ablow
English
Pronunciation
- (US) IPA(key): /əˈbloʊ/
Adjective
ablow (not comparable)
- (archaic, postpositive) Blossoming, blooming, in blossom.
- 1867, Augusta Webster, “Lota”, in A Woman Sold and Other Poems, London, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 238:
- [...] The flower breaks from its sheath and is ablow / And gives its richest perfumes. [...]
- 1891, Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Hallowmas” (poem), in A Handful of Lavender, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, page 13:
- You know, the year's not always May —
- Oh, once the lilacs were ablow !
- 1989, Stephen L. Swynn, Garden Wisdom: Or, from One Generation to Another, Ayer Publishing, →ISBN, page 110:
- [...] against the green, yet, growing in tilled soil, grow stronger and taller than any daffodil can grow in turf : hundreds of them are ablow together, and the very robustness of their splendour [...]
- (dated, postpositive) Blowing or being blown; windy.
Usage notes
- Like most adjectives formed from this sense of a-, ablow never serves as an attributive premodifier; one can say “the flowers were ablow”, “ablow, the flowers [...]”, and even “[...] the flowers ablow [...]”, but not *“[...] the ablow flowers”.
Scots
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /əˈbloː/
Preposition
ablow
References
- “ablow” in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries.
References
- “ablow, adv.2” in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries.
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