Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Sprinkled over.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Besprinkled.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- past participle Sprinkled over; strewed.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb Simple past tense and past participle of
besprenge .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective sprinkled over
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Sisman quotes a note of his to an admirer: "I ought to sit, night and day, in the Bodleian library or the Public Record Office, 'with learned dust besprent' ... wearing an eye-shade over my nose and munching a periodic dry bun, in order, by my copying of earlier copyists, to earn my place in some future Dunciad."
In praise of losers 2010
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And in dede, he shewed sufficiently, how great the grief was that pressed him, and how well the passion that he felt, was agreable to the wordes which he spake: for in pronouncing his wordes he sighed so in his tale, and changed his colour so often, and had his face so besprent with teares, as it semed his soule attached with superfluous sorrowe, would at that very instant haue abandoned his bodye.
The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 William Painter
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A compound of imbecility and baseness, yet an object of commiseration: an unmanly, blubbering, lovesick, querulous creature; a soldier, whining, piping and besprent with tears, destitute of any good quality to gain esteem, or any brilliant trait or interesting circumstance to relieve an actor under the weight of representing him.
The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810
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The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder, which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful thorny leaf.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860 Various
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QUOTATION: What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew,
Quotations 1919
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Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbowd and besprent of its dew!
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In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition -- the individual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longer prismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes the pure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into the primordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, no longer "besprent with seven-hued circumstance," is swallowed up in duration.
Four-Dimensional Vistas Claude Fayette Bragdon 1906
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Christ said, "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar of the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out" -- go out, that is, into incarnation -- into "time, besprent with seven-hued circumstance."
Four-Dimensional Vistas Claude Fayette Bragdon 1906
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And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen.
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As he sat in the sunshine he glistened all over, like an Ethiop besprent with silver; for his dark limbs and mighty chest had been oiled, and then powdered with antimony.
To Have and to Hold Mary Johnston 1903
knitandpurl commented on the word besprent
"As far as Miranda could see—all the way to Nanjing, maybe—it was lined with Western and Nipponese boutiques and department stores, and the airspace above the street was besprent with almond-size aerostats, each with its own cine camera and pattern-recognition ware to watch for suspicious-looking congregations of young men who might be Fist cells."
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, p 297 of the Spectra trade paperback
May 24, 2016