shroud

noun

1. That which clothes, covers, conceals, or protects; a garment.

   “swaddled, as new born, in sable shrouds”

   “Every time we came a research area, we had to pause while the scientists threw grey shrouds over prototypes that I wasn’t to see.”

2. Especially, the dress for the dead; a winding sheet.

   “O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of any tower, […] Or bid me go into a new-made grave And hide me with a dead man in his shroud […]”

   “Yet let us goǃ England is in her shroud – we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse.”

   “The obstructive tendency attributed to the knot in spiritual matters appears in a Swiss superstition that if, in sewing a corpse into its shroud, you make a knot on the thread, it will hinder the soul of the deceased on its passage to eternity.”

   “This is Radio Clash, you don't need that funeral shroud”

3. That which covers or shelters like a shroud.

   “Jura answers through her misty shroud.”

4. A covered place used as a retreat or shelter, as a cave or den; also, a vault or crypt.

   “The shroud to which he won / His fair-eyed oxen.”

   “a vault, or shroud, as under a church”

5. One of a set of ropes or cables (rigging) attaching a mast to the sides of a vessel or to another anchor point, serving to support the mast sideways; such rigging collectively.

   “Then - a shock of water, a wild rush of boiling foam, and I was clinging for my life to the shroud, ay, swept straight out from it like a flag in a gale.”

6. One of the two annular plates at the periphery of a water wheel, which form the sides of the buckets; a shroud plate.
7. A streamlined protective covering used to protect the payload during a rocket-powered launch.
8. The branching top of a tree; foliage.

   “Behold, the Assyrian was a Cedar in Lebanon with faire branches, and with a shadowing shrowd, and of an hie stature, and his top was among the thicke boughes.”

verb

1. To cover with a shroud.

   “The ancient Egyptian mummies were shrouded in a number of folds of linen besmeared with gums.”

   “The sliding door, which is fitted with a drop light, is shrouded with bristle-type draught excluders.”

2. To conceal or hide from view, as if by a shroud.

   “The details of the plot were shrouded in mystery.”

   “The truth behind their weekend retreat was shrouded in obscurity.”

   “One of these trees, with all his young ones, may shroud four hundred horsemen.”

   “Moon ſlip behind ſome Cloud, ſome Tempeſt riſe / And blovv out all the Stars that light the Skies, / To ſhrovvd my ſhame.”

   “As we breasted the first summit, the precipitous mass of the Raven's Rock, towering some 250 ft. above the railway, looked grim and forbidding in the failing light, and distant Ben Wyves was shrouded in mist.”

3. To take shelter or harbour.

   “[T]hough this my vvorke, ovvne not vvorth enough to deſerve your patronage, yet ſuch is your benigne humanity, that I am confident you vvill daigne it your protection, under vvhich it vvillingly ſhrovvdes it ſelfe.”

   “If your stray attendance be yet lodged, / Or shroud within these limits.”

4. (UK, dialectal, transitive)To lop the branches from (a tree).