Swelts

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To lose consciousness or collapse from weakness, heat, or shock ; to melt or cause something to melt away
2. To faint or become overcome by exhaustion or distress ; to dissolve or cause to dissolve through heat or moisture
3. To swoon or pass out from physical strain or extreme conditions ; to soften or liquefy through melting or disintegration

Etymology: "Swelts" is the third-person singular present form of "swelt," an older verb meaning to die, and the verb itself is a survivor from Old English. Its ancestor, "sweltan," meant to die or perish, and it passed through Middle English "swelten" before becoming the archaic form we see today. The word is cognate with Dutch "zwelten," which still carries the same sense of dying, so the two languages have preserved the meaning side by side for well over a thousand years. The verb's roots reach back to Proto-Germanic "sweltaną," the reconstructed ancestor shared by the early Germanic languages. A striking feature of this family is how consistently it attaches to death rather than to heat or swelling, even though modern English "swelter" has drifted toward the idea of oppressive warmth. That later sense belongs to a related but separate development, so "swelts" itself keeps the older, plainer meaning of perishing.

Synonyms: faints, swoons