▪ I. abysm
(əˈbɪz(ə)m)
Also 3–7 abime, abyme 5–7 abysme; 6–7 abisme, abism.
[a. OFr. abisme, abime (cogn. w. Pr. abisme, Sp. abismo):—late pop. L. *abyssimus, a superlative of abyssus, lit. the profoundest depth; see abyss. Abime, which appears earlier in Eng., represents the Fr. pronunciation from 10th c., now also the mod.Fr. spelling abîme. Probably abisme was at first merely an artificial spelling, in imitation of the Fr.; we find abisme rhyming with time as late as 1616; the modern pronunciation follows the spelling.]
1. prop. The great deep, the bottomless gulf, believed in the old cosmogony to lie beneath the earth, and supposed to be, spec.: b. an imaginary subterraneous reservoir of waters; c. hell, or the ‘bottomless pit,’ the ‘infernal regions.’
| c 1300 Cursor Mundi 22678 (Cotton MS.) Aboue þe erth and beneþen Right unto þe abime fra heþen [other MSS. abyme]. 1490 Caxton Eneydos xi. 43 I desire and wysshe that erste thabysme of thobscure erthe swalowe me. c 1530 Ld. Berners Arthur of Lytell Bryt. (1814) 43 The abysme and swalowe of the earth. 1632 Heywood Iron Age ii. Wks. 1874 III. 409 Yet here's a hand can rayse you, deeper cast Then to the lowest Abisme. |
| b. c 1325 E.E. Allit. P. B. 363 Þen bolned þe abyme & bonkeȝ con ryse. 1483 Caxton Gold. Leg. 39/4 The welles of the abysmes were broken and the cataractes of heven were opened. a 1834 Coleridge Dest. Nations Poems 76 Or if the Greenland wizard in strange trance Pierces the untravelled realms of Ocean's bed Over the abysm. |
| c. 1509 Barclay Shyp of Folys (1874) I. 135 Sometime he punyssheth with infernall abhyme. 1606 Shakes. Ant. & Cl. iii. xiii. 147 When my good Starres..Haue empty left their Orbes, and shot their Fires Into th' Abisme of hell. 1663 Cogan tr. Pinto's Voy. & Adv. xli. 162 The gluttonous Serpent that lived in the profound Obism of the house of smoak. 1857–69 Heavysege Saul (ed. 3) 418 Roll, roll away, thou Stygian smoke, And let me into the abysm look. |
2. Any deep immeasurable space, a profound chasm or gulf. lit. and fig.
| 1495 Caxton Vitas Patrum (W. de Worde) ii. 291 aa, His Jugemens be as a grete & a depe abysme. 1610 Shakes. Temp. i. ii. 50 What seest thou els In the dark-backward and Abysme of Time? 1616 Drummond of Hawthornden Poems 59 Feele such a case, as one whom some Abisme, In the deep Ocean kept had all his Time [in Wks. 1711, 13 printed Abime]. 1653 Cogan Diod. Siculus 95 This river..is swallowed up in an abysme or overture of the earth. 1818 Keats Endymion ii. 379 And down some swart abysm he had gone, Had not a heavenly guide benignant led. 1873 Masson Drumm. of Hawth. xi. 223 He flung himself bodily into the abysm. |
3. attrib.
| 1818 Keats Endym. iii. 28 The abysm-birth of elements. |
▪ II. † aˈbysm, v. Obs.
[a. Fr. abysme-r, earlier spelling of abîmer, f. abysme n.]
To engulf.
| 1611 Cotgr., Abysmer, to Abisme or ingulph. |