glow
/ɡloʊ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.91 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To emit light brightly and steadily as if heated to a high temperature; to shine.
Intransitive verb
verb
Of a person's body or a part of it: to feel hot and often to flush (“become suffused with a reddish colour”) as well, due to an emotional response, exertion, etc.
Intransitive verb
verb
To be involved in an (chiefly online) undercover sting operation, especially by American federal agencies.
American usage; Intransitive verb
Example Sentences
- "Iron glows red hot when heated to near its melting point."
- "The fire was still glowing after ten hours."
- "The mettled Steeds, vvhen from their Noſtrils flovvs / The ſcorching Fire, that in their Entrails glovvs."
- "To-night will I pure Magian be, / Hymns to thy [a fire's] sole honor raising, / While thou leapest fast and faster, / Wild with self-delighted glee, / Or sink'st low and glowest faintly / As an aureole still and saintly, / Keeping cadence to my praising / Thee! still thee! and only thee!"
- "The Sun, how it gloweth, all day gloweth down, / On the gray of thy turrets, O wonderful town!"
- "[N]ovv glovv'd the Firmament / VVith living Saphirs: […]"
Etymology
The verb is derived from Middle English glouen, glowen (“to give off heat and light without flame; of a thing: to be heated until red hot; to be brightly coloured; to shine brightly; (figurative) to be filled with emotion; of the face, etc.: to turn red, flush; etc.”), and then either: * from Old English glōwan (“to glow”) (a strong verb), from Proto-West Germanic *glōan (“to glow”); or * because the Middle English and modern English words are weak verbs, possibly from Old Norse *glówa, thought to be a variant of glóa (“to glow”), also a weak verb; both from Proto-Germanic *glōaną (“to glow”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰleh₁- (“to shine, glow; to be shining, glowing”). Possibly a doublet of glass. The noun is derived from the verb. cognates * Dutch gloeien * Finnish loistaa * German glühen * Norwegian glo * Old Norse glóa (Danish glo, Icelandic glóa, Swedish glo) * Saterland Frisian gloie, glöie, gluuje * West Frisian gloeie
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *ǵʰleh₁-, glouen, glōwan, *glōan, *glówa, *glōaną
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɡloʊ/
- British English: /ɡləʊ/
Usage
Inflected Forms
glows (present, singular)
glowing (participle, present)
glowed (past)
glew (dialectal, past)
glowed (participle, past)
glew (dialectal, participle)
glown (dialectal, participle)
no-table-tags (table tags)
glossary (inflection template)
glowed (first person, past)
glowest (archaic, present)
glowed (past, second person)