Word.ws English Dictionary

swelt

/swɛlt/

swelt verb: to die. Also the simple past of swell.

Verb

swelt (third-person singular simple present swelts, present participle swelting, simple past and past participle swelted or swelt)

  1. (dialectal, obsolete) To die.
  2. (dialectal, obsolete) To succumb or be overcome with emotion, heat, etc.; to faint or swelter
    • Immediatly in smoldering heate of Love the t'one did swelt,1567, Arthur Golding; Ovid's Metamorphoses Book. 1; line 571
    • Thine Israel, o God, had never endured so hard a bondage under Pharaoh, as to be over-swelted in the Egyptian furnacesa. 1656, Joseph Hall, Songs in the Night

Also used as

swelt is also the simple past of swell.

Forms of swelt

third-person singular presentswelts
present participleswelting
past participleswelted
pastswelted
past participleswelt
pastswelt

Origin of swelt

From Middle English swelten, from Old English sweltan, from Proto-West Germanic *sweltan, from Proto-Germanic *sweltaną. Cognate to Dutch zwelten (“to die”).

Words formed from swelt

Words that rhyme with swelt

12 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about swelt

What does swelt mean?
Swelt means to die.
What part of speech is swelt?
Swelt is a verb.
How do you pronounce swelt?
Swelt is pronounced /swɛlt/.
What is the past tense of swelt?
The past tense of swelt is swelted.

Words near swelt in the dictionary

  1. swellsharks
  2. swelltoad
  3. swelltoads
  4. swelly
  5. swelp
  6. swelt
  7. swelted
  8. swelter
  9. sweltered
  10. sweltering
  11. swelteringly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: swelt (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-swelt.wav.

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