| 释义 |
▪ 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.’
c1300Cursor Mundi 22678 (Cotton MS.) Aboue þe erth and beneþen Right unto þe abime fra heþen [other MSS. abyme]. 1490Caxton Eneydos xi. 43 I desire and wysshe that erste thabysme of thobscure erthe swalowe me. c1530Ld. Berners Arthur of Lytell Bryt. (1814) 43 The abysme and swalowe of the earth. 1632Heywood Iron Age ii. Wks. 1874 III. 409 Yet here's a hand can rayse you, deeper cast Then to the lowest Abisme.
b.c1325E.E. Allit. P. B. 363 Þen bolned þe abyme & bonkeȝ con ryse. 1483Caxton Gold. Leg. 39/4 The welles of the abysmes were broken and the cataractes of heven were opened. a1834Coleridge Dest. Nations Poems 76 Or if the Greenland wizard in strange trance Pierces the untravelled realms of Ocean's bed Over the abysm.
c.1509Barclay Shyp of Folys (1874) I. 135 Sometime he punyssheth with infernall abhyme. 1606Shakes. Ant. & Cl. iii. xiii. 147 When my good Starres..Haue empty left their Orbes, and shot their Fires Into th' Abisme of hell. 1663Cogan tr. Pinto's Voy. & Adv. xli. 162 The gluttonous Serpent that lived in the profound Obism of the house of smoak. 1857–69Heavysege 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.
1495Caxton Vitas Patrum (W. de Worde) ii. 291 aa, His Jugemens be as a grete & a depe abysme. 1610Shakes. Temp. i. ii. 50 What seest thou els In the dark-backward and Abysme of Time? 1616Drummond 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]. 1653Cogan Diod. Siculus 95 This river..is swallowed up in an abysme or overture of the earth. 1818Keats Endymion ii. 379 And down some swart abysm he had gone, Had not a heavenly guide benignant led. 1873Masson Drumm. of Hawth. xi. 223 He flung himself bodily into the abysm.
3. attrib.
1818Keats 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.
1611Cotgr., Abysmer, to Abisme or ingulph. |