Word.ws English Dictionary

overbrow

/ˌəʊvə(ɹ)ˈbɹaʊ/

overbrow verb: to hang over like a brow; to impend over.

overbrow: to hang over like a brow; to impend over
Image: dante luna, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

overbrow (third-person singular simple present overbrows, present participle overbrowing, simple past and past participle overbrowed)

  1. (poetic, transitive) To hang over like a brow; to impend over.
    • The prints of the Matlock cliffs on the Derwent, which every body has seen, will give the stranger some idea of the rocks which overbrow the partially wooded ravines, and glens down which the streams tributary to the Dove descend.1836, A. K. Killmister, The Oakleigh Shooting Code, page vii
    • With solemn feet I tread the hill, That overbrows the lonely vale1852, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Woods in Winter”, in The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Noun

IPA/ˈəʊvə(ɹ)bɹaʊ/

overbrow (plural overbrows)

  1. The area immediately above the eyebrow and below the forehead.
    • If the man thall have a Mole on the overbrow, then let fuch a perfon refrayne from marriage altogether , or all his life time; for that such a person (if he marry) shall have five wives in his lifetime.1649, Godfridus, The Knowledge of Things Unknown, page 155
    • I could not say that he didn't give the matter consideration, but while I noticed once in a while, by the lifting of an eyebrow or a slight corrugation of the overbrow, that the gubernatorial mind seemed to have some slight premonitory symptom of the induction of a thought, it passed off without...1914, Tennessee Bar Association, Proceedings of the Annual Session of the Bar Association of Tennessee, page 96
  2. A projecting shelf of rock on the face of a cliff.
    • For reasons of safety it was decided to drill off the overbrow and to blast it at one time to break 30,000 tons.1948, The Canadian Mining and Metallurgical Bulletin, page 10

Forms of overbrow

Verb
third-person singular presentoverbrows
present participleoverbrowing
past participleoverbrowed
pastoverbrowed
Noun
pluraloverbrows

Origin of overbrow

From over- + brow.

Questions about overbrow

What does overbrow mean?
Overbrow means to hang over like a brow; to impend over.
What part of speech is overbrow?
Overbrow can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce overbrow?
Overbrow is pronounced /ˌəʊvə(ɹ)ˈbɹaʊ/.
What is the past tense of overbrow?
The past tense of overbrow is overbrowed.

Words near overbrow in the dictionary

  1. overbrood
  2. overbrooded
  3. overbrooding
  4. overbroods
  5. Overbrook
  6. overbrow
  7. overbrowed
  8. overbrowing
  9. overbrown
  10. overbrowned
  11. overbrowning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overbrow (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-overbrow.wav.

Cite this entry: “overbrow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/overbrow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.