Dictionary

enisle en · VERB

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁én Proto-Italic *en Proto-Italic *en- Latin in- Old French en-bor. Middle English en- English en- English isle English enisle From en- + isle.

Meanings

1. (transitive) To make into an island.
   • […] park-like belts of villas enisled by lawns […] 1966, David Keir, The City of Edinburgh, Collins, page 28:
   • […] long before England itself was enisled by the sea. 1930, Walter De la Mare, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, page 118:
2. (broadly, figuratively, transitive) To isolate.
   • […] no reply / Comes from the vast, enisling sphere / Of spirit, limitless, divine, / So far from me, so strangely mine. 1876, Edmond Holmes, “After Death”, in Poems, London: Henry S. King & Co., page 82:
   • To-night, dear, / Let's forget all that, that and the war, / And enisle ourselves a little beyond time, / You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine / While the stars go over the sleepless ocean, 1925, Robinson Jeffers, “For Una”, in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press, published 2003, p:
   • […] one in ten New Orleansians lived in the projects—some 50,000 souls more or less, almost all of them women with too many children, a gulag of women and children enisled by poverty. 2005, Jed Horne, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 25:

Forms