versify
Americanverb (used with object)
-
to relate, describe, or treat (something) in verse.
-
to convert (prose or other writing) into metrical form.
verb (used without object)
verb
-
(tr) to render (something) into metrical form or verse
-
(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
For want of something else to entertain you, I begin my criticism immediately.—To versify poetical prose has been found a very difficult task.
From Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica by Hill, George Birkbeck Norman
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From George Borrow and His Circle Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of Borrow And His Friends by Shorter, Clement King
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
An NBC cynic has versified: "Nobody's brow furrows like Edward R. Murrow's."
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 palm of excellence was adjudged to Anseri, who versified the tale of Sohrab slain by his own father Roostem, one of the most pathetic and affecting narratives in any language.
From Secret Societies of the Middle Ages by Keightley, Thomas
Preparing the text has been a process of “distillation, musicalizing some phrasings and versifying some lines.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 23, 2020
Still, Gioia admits that you can’t successfully capture live-action versifying in a book.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 2, 2019
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
When he was not versifying, he was making jokes, telling anecdotes or trying to speak Little-Russian to Purring Cat, who, being from Little Russia, answered his questions with smiling passivity.
From The White Terror and The Red A novel of revolutionary Russia by Cahan, Abraham
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.
