versify
Americanverb (used with object)
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to relate, describe, or treat (something) in verse.
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to convert (prose or other writing) into metrical form.
verb (used without object)
verb
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(tr) to render (something) into metrical form or verse
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(intr) to write in verse
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of versify
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English versifien, from Old French versifier, from Latin versificāre; see verse, -ify
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In fact, I noted that Yarlexis may have benefited from a lack of facility with English in this case—some of those other queens were trying to versify overstuffed lines that made this English major cringe!
From Slate ● Nov. 13, 2012
But in the evenings, France's Secretary for Foreign Affairs continued to versify.
From Time Magazine Archive
If history's most absorbent author needed high legal drama, he had only to versify the royal squabbles in Holinshed's Chronicles.
From Time Magazine Archive
No philologist or linguist, I am yet an untiring walker and versifier: and really I think that few things are pleasanter than to walk and to versify.
From George Borrow and His Circle Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of Borrow And His Friends by Clement King Shorter
Pope, it appears, kept very closely to the words of the English translation, and in some places has done little more than versify the prose, though, of course, it is compressed, rearranged, and modified.
From Alexander Pope English Men of Letters Series by Sir Leslie Stephen
Paraphrased and versified, some of Hardwick’s letters, along with her spoken words from that supposedly merry phone call of June 25, 1970, would find their way into the book, without her permission.
From The New Yorker ● Dec. 9, 2019
The bounce of this versified self-portrait — there are six more stanzas — is quite irresistible, as T.S.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 11, 2018
Besides contributing to newspapers and magazines, he has versified for greeting cards, mottoes, calendars, bridge score pads, trade papers in which he has sung of machine tools, electric toasters, coal breakers, Mergenthalers, vacuum cleaners.
From Time Magazine Archive
Hefty, curly-haired Poet Coffin is 44, a professor of English at Wells College, Aurora, N. Y. He boasts of having versified simultaneously for popular Ladies' Home Journal and the highbrow Nation.
From Time Magazine Archive
The best surviving sample of a non-scriptural rustic play is probably Saint Guillaume of Poitou, a Breton versified drama in seven acts.
From Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) by Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
Preparing the text has been a process of “distillation, musicalizing some phrasings and versifying some lines.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 23, 2020
Its prose accretes the oracular weight of a holy text as it evokes the genesis of Little Boy’s lonely consciousness, and it exempts itself from pedestrian laws of punctuation to support the versifying rhythm.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 4, 2019
Still, Gioia admits that you can’t successfully capture live-action versifying in a book.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 2, 2019
Artfully arranged words, lofty and lowdown, are the weapons of choice in “ToasT,” Lemon Andersen’s ambitious and unwieldy new play about versifying behind bars, which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater.
From New York Times ● May 5, 2015
In versifying the philosophical system of Epicurus, Lucretius appears to have taken Empedocles as his model.
From History of Roman Literature from its Earliest Period to the Augustan Age. Volume I by John Dunlop
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
