VERGE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Verge

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/vərdʒ/ Listen

noun

Verge n.

1.

A rod or staff, carried as an emblem of authority; as, the verge, carried before a dean.

2.

The stick or wand with which persons were formerly admitted tenants, they holding it in the hand, and swearing fealty to the lord. Such tenants were called tenants by the verge. (Eng.)

3.

(Eng. Law) The compass of the court of Marshalsea and the Palace court, within which the lord steward and the marshal of the king's household had special jurisdiction; so called from the verge, or staff, which the marshal bore.

4.

A virgate; a yardland. (Obs.)

5.

A border, limit, or boundary of a space; an edge, margin, or brink of something definite in extent. "Even though we go to the extreme verge of possibility to invent a supposition favorable to it, the theory... implies an absurdity." "But on the horizon's verge descried, Hangs, touched with light, one snowy sail."

6.

A circumference; a circle; a ring. "The inclusive verge Of golden metal that must round my brow."

7.

(Arch.)

(a)

The shaft of a column, or a small ornamental shaft.

(b)

The edge of the tiling projecting over the gable of a roof.

8.

(Horol.) The spindle of a watch balance, especially one with pallets, as in the old vertical escapement. See under Escapement.

9.

(Hort.)

(a)

The edge or outside of a bed or border.

(b)

A slip of grass adjoining gravel walks, and dividing them from the borders in a parterre.

10.

The penis.

11.

(Zool.) The external male organ of certain mollusks, worms, etc.

Synonyms: Border; edge; rim; brim; margin; brink.

verb

Verge v. i. (past & past part. verged; pres. part. verging)

1.

To border upon; to tend; to incline; to come near; to approach.

2.

To tend downward; to bend; to slope; as, a hill verges to the north. "Our soul, from original instinct, vergeth towards him as its center." "I find myself verging to that period of life which is to be labor and sorrow."

See images of 'Verge'

Etymology of 'Verge'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Verge" Quotes from Famous Books

... cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord and disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. We imagine that the writer must himself have felt the scene of the roses to be pitched in a truer key than the noble scene of parting between the old hero and his son on the verge of desperate battle and certain death. This is the last and loftiest farewell note of rhyming tragedy; still, in King Richard II, and in Romeo and Juliet, it struggles for awhile to keep its footing, but now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes in these ...

— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... from each projecting cape And perilous reef along the ocean's verge, Starts into life a dim, gigantic shape, Holding its ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... boldly onward in pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the Country. They take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations, which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who, after having been brought up amid all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their parents, to a comfortless hovel in a forest. ...

— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... to escape from conscience, by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms and a certain technical phraseology to disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things—something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... to myself, "and I should not have minded saying the same thing aloud to my brothers and some of my sisters, for we most of us were heartily tired of her interference with all family arrangements, and were frequently on the verge of rebellion, but my father paid her so much deference, that we were afraid of ...

— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

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