queach

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.) Compare quick.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kwiːt͡ʃ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːtʃ

Noun

queach (plural queaches)

1. (archaic) A thick, bushy plot; a thicket.
   • 1567, Arthur Golding, Ovid's Metamorphoses: the first booke, lines 137–8:

     Men gan to shroud themselves in house. Their houses were the thickes,
     And bushie queaches, hollow caves, or hardels made of stickes.

   • 1614–1615, Homer, “The Nineteenth Book of Homer’s Odysseys”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., Homer’s Odysses. […], London: […] Rich[ard] Field [and William Jaggard], for Nathaniell Butter, published 1615, →OCLC; republished in The Odysseys of Homer, […], volume II, London: John Russell Smith, […], 1857, →OCLC:

     They found they lodged a boar of bulk extreme,
     In such a queach as never any beam

     The spelling has been modernized.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “queach”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)