bedabble

present singular third person bedabbles · participle present bedabbling · participle past bedabbled · past bedabbled

1. To dabble about or all over with moisture; make something wet by sprinkling or spattering water, paint, or other liquid on it.

   Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briers, I can no further crawl, no further go.

   c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii]

   3 more examples

   The rest was fill’d somewhat indiscriminately, with Philosophers, Antiquarians, Mathematicians, and Mechanics. A Scotch Peasant produc’d a New Orrery; a German Mechanic, a Table Fountain contriv’d to play in a Desert, to the great Entertainment, and Bedabbling of every body present […]

   1751, John Hill, chapter 7, in The Adventures of Mr. George Edwards, A Creole, London: T. Osborne, page 163

   A vision of her pale, sweet face, with her bright hair all bedabbled with gore, seemed to float constantly before his aching eyes.

   1848, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 14, in Mary Barton

   1912, Charles Egbert Craddoc (pseudonym of Mary Noailles Murfree), “The Crucial Moment” in The Raid of the Guerilla and Other Stories, Philadelphia: Lippincott, […] the weapon in Jeffrey's hand was discharged in his latest impulse of action after he fell to the floor, the blood gushing from a wound that crimsoned all the delicate whiteness of his shirt-front and bedabbled his snowy hair and beard.