beseech
/bɪˈsiːtʃ
/verb (past and past participle besought /bɪˈsɔːt/ or beseeched) [reporting verb] literary
Ask someone urgently and fervently to do or give something: [with object and infinitive]: they beseeched him to stay [with object and direct speech]: ‘You have got to believe me,’ Violet beseeched him [with object]: they earnestly beseeched his forgiveness...
- His friends urgently besought him while there was yet time to flee the country. ‘I have just been abroad… one can't keep on going abroad unless one is a missionary, or, what comes to the same thing, a commercial traveller ’, was his response.
- People who pray tend to beseech their deity for some kind of enrichment or advancement.
- The forlorn gazes of the people beseeched them to give them solace, to end their pain.
Synonyms
implore, beg, entreat, importune, plead with, appeal to, exhort, ask urgently, petition, call on, supplicate, pray to, adjure;
crave, appeal for
Scottish archaic prig
rare obsecrate, impetrate, obtest
Derivatives
beseechingly
/ adverb ...- He pouted at me and said beseechingly, ‘Come here?’
- And Arthur, looking overwhelmed, turning his eyes on her beseechingly, saying, ‘Tell me it's not real.’
- He called as loudly and beseechingly as possible, ‘Please help me!’
Origin
Middle English: from be- (as an intensifier) + Old English sēcan (see seek).
Rhymes
- mollock
- mollossus
- moll-shop
- mollusc
- Mollusca
- molluscacidal
- molluscacide
- molluscan
- molluscicidal
- molluscicide
- mollusciciding
- mollusciding
- molluscoid
- molluscoidal
- Molluscoidea
- molluscous
- molluscum body
- molluscum contagiosum
- molluscum contagiosum virus
- molluscum fibrosum
- molluscum sebaceum
- molluscum virus
- mollusk
- Mollweide projection
- molly