Word.ws English Dictionary

sweals

sweals is the third-person singular simple present indicative of sweal.

Meaning of sweal

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

Questions about sweals

What is sweals the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Sweals is the third-person singular simple present indicative of sweal.

Words near sweals in the dictionary

  1. Swea City
  2. sweal
  3. swealed
  4. swealing
  5. swealings
  6. sweals
  7. sweam
  8. sweamish
  9. sweams
  10. Sweany
  11. Sweanys

Source and license

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