bemonster

present singular third person bemonsters · participle present bemonstering · participle past bemonstered · past bemonstered

1. transitiveTo make monstrous or like a monster; make hideous; deform.

   Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame! Bemonster not thy feature!

   c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene ii]

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   One would think that clothing an official with decent taste was not a herculean task: yet ask a foreigner his opinion of the poor bemonstered force which protects our lives and purses. He might suppose that Dykwynkyn, or some other of the artists who work for the pantomimes, had designed the grotesque disfigurement of these unhappy men.

   1871 February 25, uncredited author, “Wanted for London”, in All the Year Round, page 306

   A man by men bemonstered, but by love Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove [alluding to the novel The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo]

   1880, Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Birthday Ode”, in Songs of the Springtides, London: Chatto & Windus, page 124

   Little by little the naked body was assuming shape under our hands. There were no longer those disfiguring gouts of clay which had produced dread in me by bemonstering the features.

   1980, Barry Unsworth, Pascali’s Island, New York: Norton, published 1997, page 163

2. transitiveTo fill or cover with monsters.

   1812, William Tennant, Anster Fair, Edinburgh: George Goldie, 2nd edition, 1814, Canto 4, Stanza 21, p. 119, So leap’d the men, half-sepulchred in sack, Up-swinging, with their shapes be-monstring sky,

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   It was one of the League’s rare open exhibitions, and nonmembers in ordinary dress thronged among the cartoon-colored pavilions, the hedges of bemonstered appliqué banners, and the blazons strung on wire between trees.

   1986, Peter S. Beagle, chapter 12, in The Folk of the Air, New York: Ballantine, page 165

3. transitiveTo regard or treat (someone) as a monster; to call (someone) a monster.

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   1921, R. H. Case, Review of The Percy Reprints: The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe, The Modern Language Review, Volume 16, No. 1, January 1921, p. 77, It […] ends with a crude but forceful intensification of the lust and blood of the Italian novella, complicated with the popular theme of scandalising the Pope and bemonstering the Jew.