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athirst. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
athirst, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
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English
Etymology
From Old English ofþyrst, past participle of ofþyrstan (“to smart from thirst”), equivalent to a- (“of”, Etymology 8) + thirst (verb).
Pronunciation
Adjective
athirst (comparative more athirst, superlative most athirst)
- (archaic) Thirsty.
1849, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter 10, in Shirley. A Tale. , volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder and Co., , →OCLC:To this extenuated spectre, perhaps, a crumb is not thrown once a year, but when ahungered and athirst to famine—when all humanity has forgotten the dying tenant of a decaying house—Divine Mercy remembers the mourner […]
1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Chapter 1”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
- (figuratively) Eager or extremely desirous (for something).
1817, John Keats, Sonnet (Written on a blank space at the end of Chaucer’s tale of ‘The Floure And The Leafe’:I, that forever feel athirst for glory,
Could at this moment be content to lie
Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings
Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.
1878, Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Ave Atque Vale (In Memory of Charles Baudelaire)”, in Poems and Ballads, Second Series, Stanza IV:O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,
That were athirst for sleep and no more life
And no more love, for peace and no more strife!
- 1913, Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, translated from the Bengali by the author, 5,
- I am restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
- My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
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