English

Alternative forms

• be-curtain

Verb

becurtain ‎(third-person singular simple present becurtains, present participle becurtaining, simple past and past participle becurtained)

1. To curtain; bedeck or cover with a curtain; (by extension, figuratively) to shroud.
   • 1835, Fanny Kemble, Journal, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, Vol. 1, 15 September, 1832, p. 90

     […] in that large, lofty, fine room, they had a tiny, old-fashioned, becurtained cabinet piano stuck right against the wall, unto which the singer's face was turned, and into which his voice was absorbed.

   • 1909, Maurice Hewlett, "Leto's Child" in Artemision, lines 9-11,

     She lay becurtained in loose tresses, / Not seeing what her half-dropt zone / Let of her bosom's bower be shown […]

   • 1958, Nadine Gordimer, A World of Strangers, Penguin, 1962, Chapter 8, pp. 155-6,

     At the back of her neck, the real smell of her hair came out from under the chemical scents of the processes it was subjected to in that be-curtained shop below my office […]

   • 2014, Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, "The Symphony of Rūmī" in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition, Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, Section X, "The Spirit," p. 28,

     The intellect, [the spirit's] guardian, is tremendously jealous to preserve the girl's honor and so strives to conceal her behind a multitude of veils. Amongst these veils are the body itself which becurtains our soul, and our conversation and words that cloak conceptions and ideas.

   • 2014, Sebastian Barry, Whistling Psyche & Fred and Jane:

     This is the haziest part of my recollection, in that I have been driven in my mind to befog and becurtain such early days that lacked an ambiguity proper to my status now, yet out of that dampening mist and forceful if cloudy horror rose my proper character, with eyes so open they wept in the sunlight, and heart so seared it could do no other than prompt a lifetime of resistance and revolution.

   • 2015, Leonard Lewisohn, Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry:

     This is because love manifests certain signs beneath and behind the many veils that becurtain it, [...]