Cwellan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To cause intense physical or mental suffering; to afflict with pain or distress; to torment or torture severely
2. To impose severe hardship or agony upon someone or something; to experience or endure great anguish; to cause prolonged discomfort or misery
3. To inflict great injury or sorrow; to bring about severe torment or cruel treatment; to suffer from extreme distress or torment

Etymology: Old English "cwellan" is a real verb, the ancestor of modern "quell" in its older sense of killing or torturing, not in the sense of suppressing a riot. Its core meaning was to put to death or to kill violently, and it appears in Old English texts such as Beowulf-era poetry and prose where it describes deadly violence. The word is related to "cwealm," meaning death, pestilence or murder, which shares the same root and came to be used for plague and mortal sickness. The verb has a causative character: it is the transitive form of a root that also gave Old English "cwelan," "to die." In other words, "cwellan" meant to cause someone to die, the way "fell" relates to "fall" or "set" relates to "sit." This pairing shows how the Old English vocabulary of death was built from closely related verbs with different causative and intransitive forms. Over the centuries the sense narrowed and shifted. By Middle English, "quellen" was used for killing and subduing, and the modern "quell," meaning to suppress or put down, grew out of the sense of putting down an enemy or rebellion. The older sense of cruel torment in the gloss you provided survives mainly in the historical records of Old English rather than in modern English usage.