Sweltan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Archaic term meaning to die, to pass out of life or cease to exist as a living being
2. An Old English verb for dying, used of a person or creature that comes to the end of life
3. To expire or perish, meaning to lose life, as found in older English texts and dialects

Etymology: Old English "sweltan" meant "to die," and its story is one of the more tangled ones in the family. It is the ancestor of the modern verb "swelter," which describes sweating or suffering from heat, a meaning it acquired much later. Scholars connect it to Germanic roots with the sense of dying or burning out, and the link between death and heat seems to have run through the word's history from early on, though the exact path is uncertain. The sense of dying survived in English for centuries, appearing in Middle English and in poetry and Bible translations, before it faded from ordinary use. Over time, the form and meaning shifted toward the idea of being overcome by heat, so that a verb once used for passing away came to describe dying in the sense of being oppressed by warmth. The old meaning is now archaic, but it remains visible in the modern verb's older senses.