Cwinan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to waste away, decline gradually, or languish from weakness, sorrow, or hardship
2. To pine away and grow feeble over time, as a person or creature does when suffering or deprived of strength
3. Describing the act of wasting slowly from grief, illness, or misfortune until one's vigor has faded

Etymology: Old English "cwinan" meant "to waste away, languish, pine, grow feeble." It is a verb from the Germanic root behind modern English "quine" and "quean" in its older sense, though the Old English verb itself has no direct modern descendant in common use. Its closest surviving relative is probably "quail" in the sense of losing courage, which is a different word that came into English from Old French, so readers should not take the two as the same. Words in this family show a steady drift from a physical sense of fading or wasting to a more emotional one of losing heart. This is an Old English verb, and its ancestry lies in the Proto-Germanic stem for the same idea, so there is no Latin or French pathway to trace. Forms like "cwinde" and "cwin" appear in Old English texts, which is how scholars know the verb's range of meaning.