Word.ws English Dictionary

sweal

/swiːl/

sweal verb: to burn slowly.

Verb

sweal (third-person singular simple present sweals, present participle swealing, simple past and past participle swealed)

  1. (intransitive) To burn slowly.
  2. (intransitive) To melt and run down, as the tallow of a candle; waste away without feeding the flame.
    • [M]ind ye dinna let the candle sweal as ye gang alang the wainscot parlour, and haud a' the house scouring to get out the grease again.1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter V, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume II (Old Mortality), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]...
  3. (transitive) To singe; scorch; dress (as a hog) with burning or singeing.
  4. (dialectal, transitive) To consume with fire; burn.
  5. (dialectal, transitive) To make disappear; cause to waste away; diminish; reduce.
    • "He thinks it's only a tumour!" cried Annie to her mother. "And he can sweal it away."1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “Baxter Dawes”, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC, part II, page 377

Forms of sweal

third-person singular presentsweals
present participleswealing
past participleswealed
pastswealed
alternative formswale

Origin of sweal

From Middle English swelen, from Old English swelan (“to burn, be burnt up, inflame”) (compare Old English swǣlan (“to burn”)), from Proto-West Germanic *swelan, from Proto-Germanic *swelaną (“to smoulder, burn slowly, create a burningly cold sensation”), from Proto-Indo-European *swel- (“to shine, warm, smoulder, burn”). Cognate with Dutch zwelen (“to smoulder”), Low German swelen (“to smoulder”), German schwelen (“to smoulder”), Icelandic svala (“to cool”). Related to swelter.

Words formed from sweal

Words that rhyme with sweal

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sweal

What does sweal mean?
Sweal means to burn slowly.
What part of speech is sweal?
Sweal is a verb.
How do you pronounce sweal?
Sweal is pronounced /swiːl/ (UK).
What is the past tense of sweal?
The past tense of sweal is swealed.

Words near sweal in the dictionary

  1. swchmn
  2. SWCNT
  3. SWCNTs
  4. SWE
  5. Swea City
  6. sweal
  7. swealed
  8. swealing
  9. swealings
  10. sweals
  11. sweam

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweal (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-sweal.wav.

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