Drepen

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An archaic verb meaning to beat, strike down or put to death ; to trouble, burden or cause grief and suffering to someone
2. An old English verb for hitting or slaying an enemy ; a Middle English term for weighing heavily on a person with sorrow or hardship
3. A dated verb describing the act of striking a blow or killing someone ; the action of afflicting or oppressing another with pain

Etymology: "Drepen" is an Old English verb meaning "to strike, to beat to death," and it is closely tied to the word "dread" in modern English. The two share a Germanic ancestor, and the connection runs through the idea of striking or hitting. Old English "drepan" is related to Old Norse "drepa," which also meant to strike or kill, and both descend from a Proto-Germanic root "*drepan" with the same sense. The verb is a good example of how a word for a violent physical act can fade out of everyday use while its relatives survive in unexpected places. In Old English texts it appears in contexts of battle and killing, and it was common enough in Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose that it shows up in the surviving corpus repeatedly. Its later fate was to drop out of the language entirely, leaving "dread" as the descendant most English speakers now recognize, though the original sense of "dread" as an emotional fear developed separately from the notion of striking.

Synonyms: slay, kill, smite, slaughter

Antonyms: revive, spare