besom – English noun declension

English noun forms of besom

Noun: besom
Singularbesom
Pluralbesoms

Sample Sentences

  • As a kid I went to the Russian Bath with my own father. … Down in the cellar men moaned on the steam-softened planks while they were massaged abrasively with oak-leaf besoms lathered in pickle buckets. [1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 56:]
  • At Ickwell Green, in Bedfordshire, there is a permanent maypole. There, the May Queen is accompanied by moggies (raggedly dressed women) carrying besoms - birch-twig brooms. [1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 263:]
  • "Eh, but she was a besom, if a' tales be true !" [1903, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Dark O' the Moon: A Novel, page 130:]
  • Janet's eyes began to look dim, and I had to frown at her very hard; then I had to turn my frown on Jean ... and Janet, the besom, took advantage of my divided attention. [1917, A.S. Neill., A Dominie Dismissed, page 10:]
  • Uncle Angus went on about the behavior of the car. "She's a besom, a proper besom, her and her gears. She'll be the death of me yet one of these days." [1963, Margaret McLean MacPherson, The Shinty Boys, page 187:]
  • "She's a besom but no' bad at times, like now," Agnes said as she bit into a dough-ring. [2013, Nora Kay, Best Friends:]
  • "The march of an army through a conquered country supposing it to be a highly civilized one, is a besom of destruction, whose havoc, moral and material, it would take at least a century to recover." [1851, “A Few Words about War and the Peace Congress.”, in Littell’s Living Age, volume 28, page 364:]

Etymology

From Middle English besme, beseme, from Old English besma, besema (“besom, broom, rod”), from Proto-West Germanic *besmō (“broom”). See: Middle English Nouns 'besme', Old English Nouns 'besma'.

Verbs referencing "besom"

Dutch Nouns bezem.