Word.ws English Dictionary

subverse

subverse verb: to subvert.

Verb

subverse (third-person singular simple present subverses, present participle subversing, simple past and past participle subversed)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To subvert.
    • But a usurping ape, with guile suborned, / Had all subversed1591, Ed[mund] Sp[enser], Complaints. Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie. […], London: […] William Ponsonbie, […], →OCLC

Noun

subverse (plural subverses)

  1. A kind of alternative universe.
    • You must be picking up olfactory emanations from a subverse destined to be your neighbor.2011, Adam Douglas, The Square Root of Negative Forty-Two, page 108
    • They had taken on a subverse being and come out on top, and although they did not name what had killed them, it must have been a cosmic being of supreme power.2023, Adair Hart, The Final Evolution: Book 15 of The Evaran Chronicles

Forms of subverse

Verb
third-person singular presentsubverses
present participlesubversing
past participlesubversed
pastsubversed
Noun
pluralsubverses

Origin of subverse

From Latin subversus, past participle of subvertere. See subvert.

sub- + -verse

Questions about subverse

What does subverse mean?
Subverse means to subvert.
What part of speech is subverse?
Subverse can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of subverse?
The past tense of subverse is subversed.

Words near subverse in the dictionary

  1. subventricularly
  2. subvents
  3. subverbal
  4. subverbally
  5. subvermiform
  6. subverse
  7. subversed
  8. subverses
  9. subversing
  10. subversion
  11. subversionaries

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: subverse (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: “subverse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/subverse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.