bebusy

present singular third person bebusies · participle present bebusying · participle past bebusied · past bebusied

1. intransitiverarereflexiveTo make or be busy; occupy.

   The whole composition or text is manly, they are not bebusied about Rhetorike flowers.

   1613 [1580], Michel de Montaigne, quoting Seneca the Younger, “Vpon some verses of Virgill”, in John Florio, transl., Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne […], page 490

   2 more examples

   There is no time in this month to be spent in idleness. Prudent husbandmen will bebusy and suffer none of their domestics to lounge away their hours as though time was made for sluggards only.

   1811, Robert Bailey Thomas, The Farmer’s Almanack […], May 1814, Farmer’s Calendar

   To continue: the unrated, as distinguished from the unruly, bebusied themselves with furbishing the barren abodes of Durfee, Farnam and Lawrance.

   1914, H. Roswell Hawley, “Sophomore Year”, in George Washington Patterson, editor, History of the Class of Nineteen-Hundred and Fourteen, Yale College, volume 1, pages 25–26