Beshrews

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Archaically wishes misfortune or harm upon someone, as a mild curse calling down ill luck on them
2. Old-fashioned term meaning to call down a curse or ill fortune on a person or thing
3. Used in older English to express a wish that bad luck or trouble befall someone

Etymology: "Beshrews" is the third-person singular form of "beshrew," meaning to wish misfortune upon someone, and it is the present tense of that verb. The root is "shrew," which in Middle English meant a wicked or malicious person, and the prefix "be-" added to a verb gave it the sense of acting upon something or someone. "Beshrew" therefore began as a verb meaning to curse or to bring harm through wickedness, a sense it kept as the word developed. Its earlier form was the Middle English "beschrewen," which meant to curse or to pervert. The word's surface structure, "be-" plus "shrew," is the clearest guide to how it was built, though the older shape shows that it was already a working verb in the Middle English period, when "shrew" still carried its harsher sense of a malicious person before it came to mean a bad-tempered woman.

Synonyms: curse, damn, imprecate