Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • See engulf.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To swallow up or overwhelm in, or as in, a gulf; to cast into a gulf. See engulf.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb archaic Alternative spelling of engulf.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf [sic] them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw.

    Chapter 21: The Roaring Abysmal Beast 2010

  • All these three had stood him in good stead, especially the last, which kept him wide-awake, and enabled him to sneeze a yellow hole in the drift, whenever it threatened to ingulf his beard.

    Mary Anerley Richard Doddridge 2004

  • With a heart, then, inclined to believe what I have said to thee, attend, my son, to thy Cato here who would counsel thee and be thy polestar and guide to direct and pilot thee to a safe haven out of this stormy sea wherein thou art about to ingulf thyself; for offices and great trusts are nothing else but a mighty gulf of troubles.

    Don Quixote 2002

  • The run was successfully achieved; not, however, without many weary days at the oar, and many an appeal to St. Francis for favoring winds, and for aid in the sudden tornadoes which frequently threatened to ingulf them.

    The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 Various

  • Per OED, known alternate spelling (along with ingulf and ingulph); an example of engulph quoted from an 1871 source. master and visiters [** typo: visitors] speak of the down-trodden

    Three Years in Europe Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met William Wells Brown

  • The lack of the qualities which are indispensable to any one of these may, and probably will, prove an abyss deep enough to ingulf the largest commercial ship afloat.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861 Various

  • My moral perceptions were not active, and there was a keen delight in dashing through the surf, when the billows threatened each moment to ingulf my boat, in pursuit of the wealth the greedy waves seemed eager to claim as their prey.

    Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 Various

  • The violence of the wind tore the blue into fragments, so that what only a moment since was a colossal weight of cloud threatening to ingulf the universe, was now like a great host marshaled in splendid array, flying banners of crimson, whose ranks were ever changing, until they scattered in disordered flight across the face of the sky.

    Public Speaking Irvah Lester Winter

  • Still they wind away in their gladness, when hurriedly Beltran reaches his hand for the heedless Vivia's, and hurriedly she sees terrifying grooves spreading round them, a great web-work of cracks, -- the awful ice lifts itself, sinks, and out of a monstrous fissure chill death rises to meet them and ingulf them.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 Various

  • They are afraid to approach the rocks, lest the waters should rise in anger, and ingulf them.

    Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California Caroline C. Leighton

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