Verb

(en verb)

To approach and speak to boldly or aggressively, as with a demand or request.

*{{quote-news, date = 21 August 2012

, first = Ed , last = Pilkington , title = Death penalty on trial: should Reggie Clemons live or die? , newspaper = The Guardian , url = http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/21/death-penalty-trial-reggie-clemons?newsfeed=true , page = , passage = The Missouri prosecutors' case against Clemons, based partly on incriminating testimony given by his co-defendants, was that Clemons was part of a group of four youths who accosted the sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge one dark night in April 1991. }}

(obsolete) To join side to side; to border; hence, to sail along the coast or side of.

* So much [of Lapland] as accosts the sea. - Fuller

(obsolete) To approach; to come up to.

(Shakespeare)

To speak to first; to address; to greet.

* Milton

Him, Satan thus accosts .

* 1847 , , (Jane Eyre), Chapter XVIII

She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to accost her; to make some request—"She hasted, let down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink."

(obsolete) To adjoin; to lie alongside.

* Spenser

the shores which to the sea accost

* Fuller

so much [of Lapland] as accosts the sea

To solicit sexually.

Verb

(en verb)

To hold up a claim emphatically.

(I am defending her; see a similar example in the context below for comparison.)

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=5 , passage=But Miss Thorn relieved the situation by laughing aloud,

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=70, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Engineers of a different kind , passage=Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist . Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster.}}

To demand continually that something happen or be done.

To stand (on); to rest (upon); to lean (upon).

* 1709 , Venturus Mandey, Synopsis Mathematica Universalis

Angles likewise which insist on the Diameter, are all Right Angles.