Word.ws English Dictionary

persue

persue is the obsolete form of pursue.

Meaning of pursue

Verb

pursue (third-person singular simple present pursues, present participle pursuing, simple past and past participle pursued)

  1. (ambitransitive) To follow urgently, originally with intent to capture or harm; to chase.
    • pursue one's dreams
  2. (transitive) To follow, travel down (a particular way, course of action etc.).
    • Her rival pursued a quite different course.
  3. (transitive) To aim for, go after (a specified objective, situation etc.).
    • He even stands to gain in world terms: his noisy critics strengthen his projected image of a man determined to pursue peace with Palestinians.1 December 2009, Benjamin Pogrund, “Freeze won't hurt Netanyahu”, in The Guardian
  4. (transitive) To participate in (an activity, business etc.); to practise, follow (a profession).
    • The Kedarites are depicted as herders of sheep and goats who pursued a seminomadic existence and lived scattered over a wide area of the desert region east of the land of Israel.2001, David L. Lieber, Jules Harlow, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, page 141
  5. (transitive) To urge (someone or something) to act in a particular way.
    • The mayor promised to pursue the city to be an Olympic sports venue.
  6. (intransitive) To act as a legal prosecutor.

See all 7 meanings of pursue

Forms of persue

third-person singular presentpersues
present participlepersuing
past participlepersued
pastpersued

Questions about persue

What is persue the obsolete form of?
Persue is the obsolete form of pursue.

Words near persue in the dictionary

  1. persuasively
  2. persuasiveness
  3. persuasives
  4. persuasory
  5. persubstituted
  6. persue
  7. persued
  8. persues
  9. persufflation
  10. persufflations
  11. persuing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: persue (page history and authors); pursue (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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Cite this entry: “persue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/persue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.