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befallen

[bih-fawl]

Origin

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Befallen Definition Dictionary.com Find Definitions For Any Word.Get Your Free Dictionary.com Toolbar.

verb (used without object)

1.

to happen or occur.

2.

Archaic. to come, as by right.

verb (used with object)

3.

to happen to, especially by chance or fate.

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Befallen is always a great word to know.

So is quincunx. Does it mean:

an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

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Origin:
before 900; Middle English befallen, Old English befeallan. See be-, fall (v.)

Synonyms
1. bechance, ensue, betide, materialize, chance.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To befallen

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

befall

O.E. befeallan "to deprive of; fall to, be assigned to; befall," from be- "by, about" + feallan (see fall).

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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"I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was "breaking the Lord's fourth commandment," and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. You fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work."

-Henry David Thoreau

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