Word.ws English Dictionary

subdew

subdew is the obsolete form of subdue.

Meaning of subdue

Verb

subdue (third-person singular simple present subdues, present participle subduing, simple past and past participle subdued)

  1. (transitive) To overcome, quieten, or bring under control.
    • And when their ſcattered armie is ſubdu’d:
      And you march on their ſlaughtered carkaſſes,
      Share equally the gold that bought their liues,
      And liue like Gentlmen in Perſea, […]c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC...
  2. (transitive) To bring (a country) under control by force.
    • In the run-up to his return to the White House next Monday, Mr. Trump has rattled the world, and America’s neighborhood in particular, with a list of objectives – buying Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state – that treat friendly nations as weak interlocutors and...2025 January 14, Howard LaFranchi, “In Biden-Trump handoff, a foreign policy shift for a changed world?”, in The Christian Science Monitor
    Synonyms:
    conquer, underbring

Forms of subdew

third-person singular presentsubdews
present participlesubdewing
past participlesubdewed
pastsubdewed

Questions about subdew

What is subdew the obsolete form of?
Subdew is the obsolete form of subdue.

Words near subdew in the dictionary

  1. subdevelopments
  2. subdevice
  3. subdevices
  4. subdevil
  5. subdevils
  6. subdew
  7. subdewed
  8. subdewing
  9. subdews
  10. subdiabetogenic
  11. subdiaconal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: subdew (page history and authors); subdue (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: “subdew.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/subdew. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.