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
If a wedding had occurred during his absence he was ready to versify it, and equally ready to lament the loss of a favorite cow.
From Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860 by Henrietta Christian Wright
"St. Alexis," said Babie; "he was asked to versify it."
From Magnum Bonum by Charlotte Mary Yonge
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
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
Moreover, both kinds of interest deteriorated, reaching a nadir in a thin book of thin versified prattle called America Was Promises, in 1939.
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
The voices collected here elaborate and extend the mantras, such as Langston Hughes versifying his insistence that America live up to its myth, and James Baldwin defining protest as a duty.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 11, 2020
Preparing the text has been a process of “distillation, musicalizing some phrasings and versifying some lines.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 23, 2020
What “The Bricks That Built the Houses” fails, at times, to give us is the measure of its author’s keen lingual instinct, the charisma and dynamism of Tempest on a stage, freestyling, reciting, versifying.
From The New Yorker ● May 10, 2016
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
Thus Grant in Laura’s autograph album after all his versifying on the kitchen table could only write “Truly Yours” and leave her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted.
From In the Heart of a Fool by William Allen White
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.
