The prefix be- has a wide range of meanings and applications. It can be added, forming transitive verbs, to nouns (befriend), adjectives (belittle), and other verbs (bespeak) and it can help turn nouns into participial adjectives (witch → bewitched; suit → besuited).
Prefixing a word with be- often lends the sense ‘about, around, all over’ or ‘completely’. It can also intensify it, as in the line ‘Snails, much despised, bekicked, and becrushed’ in George Kearley’s natural history book Links in the Chain (1863). Or it can suggest affecting or afflicting something greatly, as in bestench (1568) ‘to afflict with stench’.
The prefix was common in Old English, appearing in words like befealdan ‘fold round’ and behātan ‘promise’ (examples are from Burchfield’s The English Language) and becoming part of prepositions like before, behind, below, beneath, and beyond. In Middle English be- continued to spread, being added also to imports from French and other Romance languages: becalm, beguile, belabour, besiege.
Word formation with be- was prodigious a few centuries ago, far less so nowadays. Many of the words thus formed fell out of use, so the OED is bespattered (1674) with archaic be- words, some of them most besotting (1743). Susie Dent introduced me to bescumber ‘to scumber on’ (1599), i.e., ‘spray poo on’; it was even used by Ben Jonson, as I reported in a Strong Language post about Dent’s Guide to Swearing.
Becack and bedung, from the same era, are more or less synonymous. Beshit and beshite are over a thousand years old and, per the OED, were ‘common in Middle English and early modern English literature’. I got to bebrowsing (2017) these and less scumbersome examples after this bit of serendipitous bewonderment:
Coast road in north County Clare, the horizon begloomed and beclouded.
Here are some others I like, with glosses and dates taken mostly from the OED:
bebass: to kiss all over (1582)
bebeast: to make a beast of (1640)
be-belzebubbed: bedevilled (1814)
bebishop: to make into a bishop
bebog: to entangle in a bog (1661) (‘His feet were fixed in Ireland, where he was not bebogg’d’ – Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England)
bebothered: very bothered (1866)
bebrave: to make brave (1576)
bebutter: to cover with butter (1611)
becomma: to sprinkle with commas (1881)
becurse: to cover with curses (1570)
bedark: to involve in darkness (1393)
bedinner: to treat with a dinner, give a dinner to (1837)
bedrowse: to make drowsy (1877)
bedusk: to shroud in gloom, as of twilight (1566)
befist: to belabour with the fists (1718)
begaudy: to make gaudy (1640)
beguilty: to render guilty (1628)
behate: to hate greatly, detest (c.1374)
beheaven: to endow with celestial bliss (1601)
beheretic: to call, stigmatize, or treat as a heretic (1539)
behoney: to smear or sweeten with honey, or (fig.) with honied words (1611)
beginger: to spice with ginger (1611)
behearse: to place in a hearse (1594)
behoot: to hoot at (1838)
behorror: to horrify (1857)
bejesuit: to initiate in Jesuitism; to work upon by, or subject to, Jesuits (1644)
beleper: to afflict with, or as with, leprosy (1625)
beletter: to serve with letters, to write to (1655)
belimb: to cut off a limb, to dismember, mutilate (c.1225)
bemad: to make mad, to madden (1655) (‘O god-detested! god-bemadded race!’ – Æschylus, Lyrical Dramas, tr. John Stuart Blackie, 1850)
bemercy: to treat with mercy, show mercy to (1660)
bemissionary: to pester with missionaries (1884)
bemonster: to make a monster of (1692)
bemurmur: to murmur at or against (1837)
benettle: to sting or rub with nettles (1611)
bepaw: to befoul as with paws (1684)
bepistle: to inflict epistles on (1589)
beprose: to turn into prose (1733)
besauce: to apply sauce to (1674)
beshag: to make shaggy (1604)
beslipper: to present with slippers (1866)
besnowball: to snowball soundly (1611)
besonnet: to address or celebrate in sonnets (1860)
bespurtle: to asperse or befoul with anything spurted on; also fig. (1616)
bestare: to stare at (1220)
bestorm: to storm on all sides (1651)
bestrut: to strut or walk pompously over (1594)
be-togaed: wearing a toga (1856)
betwattle: to bewilder (dial.) (1686)
bethwack: to thwack soundly (1598)
betongue: to assail with the tongue (1639)
bewhape: to bewilder, amaze, confound utterly (c.1320)
bewhisper: to whisper to (1674)
bewinter: to overtake or affect with winter (1647)
bewizard: to influence by a wizard (1862)
beyelp: to talk loudly of, boast of, glory in (c.1330)
There are hundreds upon bemazing hundreds of mostly forgotten be- words. Let us bepopulate the language with these beloves again – or beword new ones, whether necessary or not, to suit our fancy.
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Great post! Let me bewhisper you something: in Dutch, bewonder still exists! It means ‘to admire’. Is that the same as ‘to fill with wonder’? Not quite. In Dutch bewonder, the person who does the admiring is filled with wonder (rather than filling something else with wonder). Even so, it’s very close!
I bethank (1593) you! Though I didn’t mention it in the post, a second sense of bewonder arose in 1610, defined in the OED as: ‘to wonder at, regard wonderingly, admire’. This seems (or beseems) to match the Dutch usage.
The Scandinavian languages, too, use a cognate of “bewonder” to mean “admire”.
Good to know. Thank you.
As Ramses Shaffy sang, “Zing, vecht, huil, bid, lach, werk en bewonder”!
And here’s Le Guin in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”, denouncing the abuses of the heroic style:
Great stuff. Beslime (Ben Jonson again, 1602) is especially pleasing. And by a beseemly coincidence, I just finished reading Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, bebumped up the pile after the comments on my Embassytown post.
But why does this form seem to have largely gone out of common use?
Many be- words are still in common use; it’s more a case of the prefix no longer being very productive in forming new words. Why the shift, I don’t know: probably for many reasons, some of them arbitrary.
Somehow I really like these be- words! I think we should revive bepistle – which would now mean to send out way too many emails!
Good idea! Bepistling can easily cross the line into bespamming.
Sir Toby Belch twice says /betimes/ (adverb). Wiktionary says prefix /be-/ in this case began as /bi-/ in /bitimes/, meaning /by-/.
So also says the American Heritage Dict. When Sir Toby talks about staying awake past midnight, he means until way late, perhaps until early light; which is presumably unbecoming.
Checking further, I became aware of /beware/, for ex., which asks no preposition before the Ides of March and scans better without one.
Meanwhile, Eric Partridge’s double-columned “Origins” has nine entries for prefix /be-/. EP considers four uses of /be-/ are intensive, two causative, the others privative, denominative, transitive; all neat and tidy, no bewilderment (!)
Yes, it was an unstressed form of bi ‘by’, but it didn’t begin as it, since both can be traced back to the PIE root *ambhi ‘around’, which the AHD says is probably derived from *ant-bhi ‘from both sides’.
I really like the AHD.
I have a fondness for “belike”, although I never have simultaneously the presence of mind and the nerve to use it in conversation.
If people give you funny looks for using it, tell them you’re from the future and speaking Trigedasleng.
One book on the curiosities of English I read a long time ago discussed ‘bedrape’ and ‘bedrug’. ‘bedrape’ is ‘be + drape’ not ‘bed + rape’ and ‘bedrug’ is ‘bed + rug’ not ‘be + drug’.
Context would generally disambiguate these immediately, but they do lend themselves to creative rebracketing (bedrift, begrain, besteer, betrace, etc.).
I like ‘bedinner’! One of the surest ways to get behoneyed by anyone, and also practical. I shall be bedinnering the kids every day from now on.
What would be the past or participle forms of ‘beheretic’ and how would they be pronounced?
Bedinner is one of my favourites too, and one of a few I’ve used since discovering it! I think those forms of heretic would need a ‘k’, thus hereticked /ˈherətɪkt/, hereticking /ˈhɛrɪtɪkɪŋ/.
Hmm, I have a friend who keeps trying to bedinner me, only I’m, uh, not so interested. And not ’cause he’s a boring cook, either.
[…] A to Z of English usage myths […]
[…] The prefix be– used to be more common and productive than it is now. A few months ago the Irish editor/language writer/blogger Stan Carey found himself Bewondered by obsolete be- words. […]
[…] https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/bewondered-by-obsolete-be-words/
Formerly much more productive be-. […]
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[…] He begins to feel he is ‘eating the alphabet’: 26 courses of letters, ‘each with its own distinctive flavor’. Q is disappointing, B ‘wildly entertaining’, in large part because of be-, a prefix that bewonders me too. […]