overawe

present singular third person overawes · participle present overawing · participle past overawed · past overawed · alternative over-awe

1. transitiveTo restrain, subdue, or control by awe; to cow.First known use 16th c.

   None doe you like, but an effeminate Prince, Whom like a Schoole-boy you may ouer-awe.

   1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]

   2 more examples

   His free and easy carriage evinced, that though acknowledging my assumptions, he was no way overawed by them; treating me as familiarly, indeed, as if I were a mere mortal, one of the abject generation of mushrooms.

   1849, Herman Melville, “ch. 57”, in Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, volume I

   He kept the biggest estates, and where he lacked troops to overawe the natives he evicted the natives and made a game reserve.

   2000, Alasdair Gray, The Book of Prefaces, Bloomsbury, published 2002, page 61