Beorhtian

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to make something bright, or to give off light and brilliance
2. An archaic word for causing something to shine or become luminous and radiant
3. Describing the act of brightening or lighting up a thing so that it gleams

Etymology: Beorhtian is an Old English verb meaning "to shine" or "to be bright," and it survives in English only as a fossil. It descends from "beorht," the Old English word for bright, which has the same ancestry as German "berühmt" in the sense of famous and "bright" itself. The verb was a normal, productive part of the Old English vocabulary, formed by adding the verb-making suffix "-ian" to the adjective. Its descendants went in different directions. Modern English "bright" is the adjective, and the verb form was lost during the Middle English period, so it never became a common word in the language. Dictionaries of Old English, such as the Bosworth-Toller, record it from texts including the poetry and prose of the period, which is how we know its meaning today.