Cwealu

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic Old English noun meaning death, or the act of killing someone
2. A word from Old English referring to a violent death or the killing of a person
3. Old English term for death, slaying or the deadly ending of a life

Etymology: Old English "cwealu" meant death, or the act of killing, and it survives today mainly as a legal term. The word belongs to the family of "cwellan," "to kill" or "to torment," which is also the source of the modern verb "quell," originally meaning to kill or subdue before it came to mean to suppress. The noun shows up in Anglo-Saxon texts in its plain sense of slaying, and its relatives are still visible in the Old English word for "murderer," "cwellere," which never made it into modern English. The more striking afterlife came through the law. Medieval English courts used "cwealu" in their own sense, and the term "cwealm" and its compounds survived in legal and historical writing long after everyday speech had let them go. Dictionaries record it as a word for death or killing that scholars and writers have revived for an archaic flavour, so most modern readers meet it only in old texts or in discussions of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.