Skip to content
OneKitly

beseech

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • //bɪˈsiːt͡ʃ//

To beg or implore something of (a person).

verb

  1. 1

    To beg or implore something of (a person).

    [W]e beſche thee, leaue vs not comfortles, but ſende to vs thine holy ghoſt to comfort vs, and exalte vs vnto thy ſame place, whither our ſauiour Chriſte is gone before: […]

    I flung myself before him on my knees, and with floods of tears besought him to release me from this engagement, assuring him that my cowardice was abject, and that in every point of intellect and character I was his hopeless and derisible inferior.

    after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation?

    She besought him, for his Soul's sake to speak the truth.

  2. 2

    To beg or request for (something).

    [T]he tickets had all been given out, begged, besought long ago.

Etymology

From Middle English besechen, bisechen, prefixed form of Old English sēċan (“to seek or inquire about”); compare the doublet beseek, from the same dialect that gave seek. Cognate with Saterland Frisian besäike (“to visit”), Dutch bezoeken (“to visit, attend, see”), German besuchen (“to visit, attend, see”), Swedish besöka (“to visit, go to see”). By surface analysis, be- + seech.

noun

  1. 1

    archaicA request.

    Good madam, hear the suit that Edith urges, With such submiss beseeches; [...]

Forms

plural
beseeches
past tense
beseeched, besought
past participle
beseeched, besought
present participle
beseeching
third person singular
beseeches
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).