Meaning of overswell | Babel Free

Definitions

1. To swell or rise above (something, especially the rim of a container, the sides of something hollow, etc.).
   ambitransitive
2. To cause (something) to be too swollen or large; to become too swollen or large.
   ambitransitive

Examples

“In some years the river overswells its banks, causing widespread flooding.”

“Let floods o’erswell, and fiends for food howl on!”

“Fill, Lucius, till the wine o’erswell the cup;”

“Come, you have made mee resolute and bould, And now receive your lapps ore-swell’d with gold.”

“1768, Ignatius Sancho, letter to Mr. M—, in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, London: J. Nichols, 3rd edition, 1784, p. 13, […] the heart gratefully throbbing—overswelled with thankful sensations”

“When mushrooms they were fairy bowers, Their marble pillars over-swelling,”

“[…] then Badoglio and his staff [went by] looking rather big for their cars, like the necks of bookmakers overswelling their collars;”

“[…] the rents of lands still grew higher upon every lease that expired, till they have arrived at the present exorbitance; when the frog, overswelling himself, burst at last.”

“1885, Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, The Burton Club, Volume 1, Translator’s Foreward, p. xvi, My annotations avoid only one subject, parallels of European folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting, would overswell the bulk of a book whose speciality is anthropology.”

“A frequent difficulty in the manufacture of Emmental cheese in America, and perhaps elsewhere, is a tendency for the cheese to overswell.”

“[The monster’s] ungrateful progeny rush to gorge on her blood, but it overswells their bellies and they literally burst to death.”

CEFR level