Verb

(head)

(empower)

Verb

(en verb)

To give permission, power, or the legal right to do something.

* {{quote-book, year=1985, author=William H. Tench, title=Safety is no accident

, passage=Regulations have been made under the Civil Aviation Acts of 1949, 1980 and 1982 which empower Inspectors of Accidents to do these things.}}

To give someone more confidence and/or strength to do something, often by enabling them to increase their control over their own life or situation.

It's not enough to give women and minorities equal rights on paper; they need to be empowered to be able to make use of these rights.

John found that starting up his own business empowered him greatly in social situations.

* {{quote-book, year=1992, author=Nick Logan, title=The Face, page=11-130

, passage=Musically, what originally attracted me to dance was its shamanist aspects, using natural magic to change people's neurological states and to psychologically empower them.}}

Verb

(head)

(embower)

Verb

(en verb)

(poetic) To enclose something or someone as if in a bower; shelter with foliage.

*

Her hand he seis’d, and to a shadie bank, / Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr’d

* 1809 , , A History of New York …, by Dietrich Knickerbocker

A small Indian village, pleasantly embowered in a grove of spreading elms.

* 1852 ,

And the silent isle imbowers / The Lady of Shalott

* 1884 , , Bound Together

The embowered lanes, and the primroses and the hawthorn

*1900 , , The House Behind the Cedars , Chapter I,

*:A few rods farther led him past the old black Presbyterian church, with its square tower, embowered in a stately grove; past the Catholic church, with its many crosses, and a painted wooden figure of St. James in a recess beneath the gable; and past the old Jefferson House, once the leading hotel of the town, in front of which political meetings had been held, and political speeches made, and political hard cider drunk, in the days of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

To lodge or rest in or as in a bower.

* 1591 , , Virgil’s Gnat , line 225

But the small birds in their wide boughs embowring / Chaunted their sundrie tunes with sweete consent;

To form a bower.

* (and quote)