/laɪð/
OriginFrom Middle English lithe, from Old English līþe (“gentle, mild”), from Proto-West Germanic *linþ(ī), from Proto-Germanic *linþaz, from Proto-Indo-European *lentos.
Akin to Saterland Frisian lied (“thin, skinny, gaunt”), Danish, Dutch, and archaic German lind (“mild”). Some sources also list Latin lenis (“soft”) and/or Latin lentus (“supple”) as possible cognates.
- obsoleteMild; calm.
- Slim but not skinny.
“lithe body”
“The noise of their battle with Numa had drawn an excited horde of savages from the nearby village, and a moment after the lion’s death the two men were surrounded by lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulatin”
“She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had expected to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish”
- Capable of being easily bent; flexible.
“the elephant’s lithe trunk.”
“… she danced with a kind of passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with flexuous grace …”
“Doolittle and myself waited. Colebrook kept on cautiously, squirming his long body in sinuous waves like a lizard's through the grass, and was soon lost to us. No snake could have been lither.”
- Adaptable.
“Yet the 2016 Éxilé rosé from Lise et Bertrand Jousset in the Loire Valley, made mostly of gamay, was yeasty let^([sic – meaning yet]) light and lithe, while the 2016 Indigeno from Ancarani in Emilia-R”
- intransitive, obsoleteTo become calm.
- obsolete, transitiveTo make soft or mild; soften; alleviate; mitigate; lessen; smooth; palliate.
“England.. hath now suppled, lithed and stretched their throats.”
“Give me also faith, Lord,.. to lithe, to form, and to accommodate my spirit and members.”
- intransitive, obsoleteTo attend; listen, hearken.
- transitiveTo listen to, hearken to.
- Yorkshire, archaic, dialectalto thicken (gravy, etc.)
“lithe widely used as a verb in nEng Sc and Ir, as a noun only in Cu”
“to render lithe or thick, to thicken (broth, etc.)”
“lithe 'to thicken soups, sauces, etc.'”
- ScotlandShelter.
“So Cospatric got him the Pict folk to build a strong castle there in the lithe of the hills, with the Grampians dark and bleak behind it, and he had the Den drained and he married a Pict lady and got ”
Formslither(comparative) · lithest(superlative) · lithes(present, singular, third-person) · lithing(participle, present) · lithed(participle, past) · lithed(past) · lythe(alternative) · lithes(plural)