Collow

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To make something black or grimy by coating it with soot, coal dust or a similar dark residue
2. To smear or darken a surface with sooty matter so that it looks dirty and blackened
3. Describing the act of dirtying or blackening an object with smoke residue or coal particles

Etymology: The verb "collow" is a rare survivor from Middle English, now effectively obsolete, meaning to blacken or smudge something with soot or coal. Its ancestry runs back to Old English, where a verb along the lines of "colgian" was built on the noun "col," meaning charcoal or coal, and the same root gave modern English "coal" itself. Early English speakers were therefore describing a very physical act: getting black on your hands, your face, or your cooking pots. The word is attested in Middle English in forms such as "colwed" and "colwinge," which show it being used as a participle and a gerund, although the reconstructed Middle English base form itself is marked as hypothetical. Its recorded life was short, and it did not survive into the standard vocabulary of later English. The word is best understood as a sooty, workaday verb that belonged to the same family as "coal," which probably explains why it sounds so close to words about burning and blackening.