Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To change from prose into metrical form.
- intransitive verb To treat or tell in verse.
- intransitive verb To write verses.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To turn into verse; make a metrical paraphrase of: as, to
versify the Psalms. - To relate or describe in verse; treat as the subject of verse.
- To make verses.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- intransitive verb To make verses.
- transitive verb To relate or describe in verse; to compose in verse.
- transitive verb To turn into verse; to render into metrical form.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive to make or compose verses
- verb intransitive to tell in verse; deal with in verse form
- verb intransitive to turn (
prose ) into poetry; rewrite in verse form
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb compose verses or put into verse
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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She also inspires poets to versify pointless incidents from their everyday lives.
The Anti-Muses : A.E. Stallings : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007
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It doesn't take genius to versify a literal translation.
Archive 2009-06-01 Rus Bowden 2009
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A litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
E. L. Doctorow: "I fault this President for not knowing what death is" 2008
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And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
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Never does one feel the imposition of a despotic “I” that St Paul identified as the very voice of the devil, but the benevolence of a friend to the truth whose ambition may have been, according to his own terms, to “versify the Sophia Perennis.”
Introducing Jean Biès Tusar N Mohapatra 2006
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But everybody else had realised that the trio was struggling for mastery, so without attempting to versify they kept their gaze fixed on them and gave way to laughter.
Hung Lou Meng 2003
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In her "Introduction" to Kissing the Rod, Germaine Greer comments that the "attempt to versify on religious themes was a discipline intended to focus concentration on well-worn pious truisms" (12).
My Name Was Martha: A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem 1993
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With books of popular science pouring from the press, and models like Thomson's and Glover's before them, poets set themselves happily to versify
Dictionary of the History of Ideas MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON 1968
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So it was that the scholar began his researches at the abbey, continuously aware of the three novices who toiled at the drive-mill and the fourth novice who invited glare-blindness atop the ladder to keep the lamp burning and adjusted-a situation which caused the Poet to versify mercilessly concerning the demon Embarrassment and the outrages he perpetrated in the name of penitence or appeasement.
A Canticle for Leibowitz Miller, Walter M. 1959
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But everybody else had realised that the trio was struggling for mastery, so without attempting to versify they kept their gaze fixed on them and gave way to laughter.
Hung Lou Meng, Book II Or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel in Two Books Xueqin Cao
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