whelm

verb

1. (archaic, transitive)To bury, to cover; to engulf, to submerge.

   “Giue fire: ſhe is my prize, or Ocean whelme them all.”

   “Still let me walk; for oft' the ſudden Gale / Ruffles the Tide, and ſhifts the dang'rous Sail, / Then ſhall the Paſſenger, too late, deplore / The whelming Billow, and the faithleſs Oar; [...]”

   “Such is the fate of ſimple Bard, / On Life's rough ocean luckleſs ſtarr'd! / Unſkilful he to note the card / Of prudent Lore, / Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, / And whelm him o'er!”

   “Deep-whelm'd beneath, in vast sepulchral caves, / Oblivion dwells amid unlabell'd graves; / The storied tomb, the laurell'd bust o'erturns, / And shakes their ashes from the mould'ring urns.”

   “The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.”

2. (obsolete, transitive)To throw (something) over a thing so as to cover it.

   “Gnats and Flies are very troubleſome in Houſes [...] Balls made of Horſe-dung and laid in a Room will do the ſame [attract gnats and flies] if they are new made; by which means you may whelm ſome things over them and keep them there.”

3. (obsolete, transitive)To ruin or destroy.

   “Here, where a Cæsar stood two thousand years ago, the traveller from another continent (though not from New Zealand) stands to-day, to muse—at Pæstum, as at Pompeii—on the fate which overtakes all human things, and at last whelms man and his works in one undistinguishable ruin.”

   “In the twentieth night of the nine hundredth moon, as night came up the valley, I performed the mystic rites of each of the gods in the temple as is my wont, lest any of the gods should grow angry in the night and whelm us while we slept.”

4. (archaic, intransitive)To overcome with emotion; to overwhelm.

   “Hear Thou our plaint, when light is gone / And lawlessness and strife prevail. / Hear, lest the whelming weight of crime / Wreck us with life in view; / Lest thoughts and schemes of sense and time / Earn us a sinner's due.”

noun

1. (also, figuratively, poetic)A surge of water.

   “the whelm of the tide”

   “I wonder about things and the people between us. The currents, the feedback, and the whelms. The sharp cracks between trees, and the tolling between the knees.”

   “[...] I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor / Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm / Of one and all the full length of the train.”

   “As our country developed, the clash of new immigrating cultures were all positioning themselves throughout the United States and their political leaders were individually striving for their own egotistical whelm of power [...]”

2. A wooden drainpipe, a hollowed out tree trunk, turned with the cavity downwards to form an arched watercourse.

   “A whelm was a wooden drainpipe, a hollowed-out tree trunk, "whelmed down" or turned with the concavity downwards to form an arched watercourse.”