Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To suffer from oppressive heat.
- v. To affect with oppressive heat.
- v. Archaic To exude (venom, for example).
- n. A condition of oppressive heat.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To faint with heat; be ready to perish with heat.
- To perspire freely; sweat.
- To oppress with heat.
- To cause to exude like sweat, by or as if by heat.
- [Sweltered venom is also explained as venom moistened with the animal's sweat.]
- To soak; steep.
Wiktionary
- v. intransitive To suffer terribly from intense heat.
- v. intransitive To perspire greatly from heat.
- n. Intense heat.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To be overcome and faint with heat; to be ready to perish with heat.
- v. obsolete To welter; to soak.
- v. To oppress with heat.
- v. rare To exude, like sweat.
WordNet 3.0
- v. be uncomfortably hot
- v. suffer from intense heat
Etymologies
- Frequentative form of swelt, from Old English sweltan. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English swelteren, frequentative of swelten, to faint from heat, from Old English sweltan, to perish. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The record high "swelter" lasted from July 21-26, making the string of unabated heat the longest high temperatures ever recorded in Wayne County, and residents endured the heat without benefit of air conditioning.”
“At the rehearsal dinner, au contraire, I will have nothing between me and the elements except my kurta, and will have to hope for swelter.”
“I'm a bit ill from the most recent increase in my Prazosin dosage, bad timing with this swelter.”
“I only managed 616 words on "January 28, 1926," before the swelter of the office got to me.”
“This year the match was several weeks earlier than usual to avoid last year's swelter, Mr. Figueras explained.”
“I'm not arguing that one should swelter in woolen knee socks during July and August.”
“That was 1980, a year of such sizzle and swelter that it has become memorable to those who experienced it, and created widespread doubt that its misery could ever be matched.”
The Washington Post: Record-breaking heat wilts National Book Festival crowd
“Dallas hit 100 degrees for an unprecedented 70th day as Texas continued to swelter under record summer heat.”
“Arpaio knows that the genteel class is willing to do just about anything to avoid having to serve time in the tents, where inmates are packed in like rats to swelter in the summer and get chilled to the bone in the winter.”
“Anyway, I'd swelter now, and tomorrow just load the car and leave fresh in the morning, right?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘swelter’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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pagecrusher's Words
fugu, ilk, rigamarole, superfluous, dearth, sacrosanct, moniker, bifurcate, villainous, onus, brazen, odin and 268 more...
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eggplantia5's Words
scintillate, marvel, cranberry, oscillate, triumph, bamboozle, grimace, magical, book, hexagon, cipher, compendium and 2727 more...
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beatricks's Words
tremendous, naiad, thrush, samsara, thronging, nascent, broom, aristeia, streak, susurrant, reverberate, resistentialism and 352 more...
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Words that delight me
tepid, perfunctory, trope, benign, inordinate, bewildering, ersatz, boon, delectable, apt, scuttlebutt, sequester and 398 more...
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daleshipley's Words
brinksmanship, contravene, teleological, sartorial, conventicle, habiliment, tendentious, acrimonious, ontology, epistemology, impugn, dysphasia and 219 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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SAT PSAT ALPHABETICAL S
surrogate, supplanted, supercilious, supersede, substantiate, synopsis, symmetry, sumptuous, swelter, swagger, surmise, summation and 156 more...
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librarygoblin's words
crystal, ghost, mist, snow, labyrinth, citadel, tomb, mystery, arcane, conundrum, echo, dynamo and 389 more...
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Trump that synonym!
Better alternatives for common words.
ex cathedra, screed, de rigueur, palpable, wheedle, piebald, incongruity, cassandra, xantippe, ebullient, exuberant, fainéant and 178 more...
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Sat Vocabulary List
abandon, abash, abate, abjure, ablution, abnegate, abominable, aboriginal, abortive, abrade, abridge, abrogate and 2155 more...
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GRE 3500 S
saccharine, sacrilegious, sacrosanct, sagacious, sage, salient, salutary, salvo, sanctimonious, sanguine, sap, sardonic and 138 more...
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Words That Populate My Mind
This is a collection of words I love, old ones that I love the sound of when I repeat them for years and new ones coined in news articles on up and coming trends and technologies - most of them I k...
aroma, mojo, blithely, fringe, fray, synchronicity, doublespeak, buzzword, thoughtcrime, portmanteau, newspeak, oldspeak and 963 more...
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ash
ash
abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abide, abject, abjure and 4874 more...
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"Heat" Verbs
sear, heat, burn, broil, bake, blaze, boil, char, enflame, flame, flush, incinerate and 21 more...
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ifea_need_help's Words
irk, porn, woot, pfft, fuck, swelter, homonculus, astronomical, booboo, capitulate, liquidation, pendulum and 30 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for swelter.
bilby "Melbourne's all-time weather record has been broken and the city is sweltering under the twin effects of high temperatures and hot north-west winds. The city hit 46 degrees at 2.27pm - the hottest day since the Bureau of Meteorology started keeping records 150 years ago. The previous record was 45.6, set on January 13, 1939 - a day otherwise known as Black Thursday."
- Hamish Townsend, 'City swelters, records tumble in heat', theage.com.au, 7 February 2009. Feb 7, 2009