Lithe vs Lither - What's the difference?
lithe | lither |
(obsolete) To go.
(obsolete) Mild; calm.
slim but not skinny
*
Capable of being easily bent; pliant; flexible; limber
* 1861 , , page 125
(obsolete) To become calm.
(obsolete) To make soft or mild; soften; alleviate; mitigate; lessen; smooth; palliate.
(obsolete) To give ear; attend; listen.
To listen to.
(Scotland) Shelter.
* 1932 , (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), Sunset Song :
(lithe)
* 1900 — , ch VIII
Bad; wicked; false; worthless; slothful; lazy.
* 1592 :
* 1653 , Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux (translators), (1534), chapter XL
* 1850 , H. I. (translator), Reverand Thomas Harding, A.M. (editor), The Decades of Henry Bullinger, Minister of the Church of Zurich.'', ''Third Decade , The Parker Society, Great Britain, page 32
* 1920 , Charles Whibley, Literary Portraits, Ayer Publishing, ISBN 0836909887, page 63
As adjectives the difference between lithe and lither
is that lithe is (obsolete) mild; calm while lither is (lithe) or lither can be bad; wicked; false; worthless; slothful; lazy.As a verb lithe
is (obsolete) to go or lithe can be (obsolete) to become calm or lithe can be (obsolete) to give ear; attend; listen.As a noun lithe
is (scotland) shelter.lithe
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) lithen, from (etyl) . See also (l), (l).Verb
Etymology 2
From (etyl) lithe, from (etyl) .Adjective
(er)- ''lithe weather
- lithe body
- She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had thought to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe , polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp.
- the elephant’s lithe proboscis.
- … she danced with a kind of passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with flexuous grace …
Synonyms
* lithesome, lissome,Etymology 3
From (etyl) lithen, from (etyl) .Verb
(head)Etymology 4
From (etyl) lithen, from (etyl) . More at (l).Verb
(lith)Etymology 5
Origin uncertain; perhaps an alteration of (lewth).Noun
(en noun)- So Cospatric got him the Pict folk to build a strong castle there in the lithe of the hills, with the Grampians dark and bleak behind it, and he had the Den drained and he married a Pict lady and got on her bairns and he lived there till he died.
Anagrams
*lither
English
Etymology 1
See (lithe)Adjective
(head)- Doolittle and myself waited. Colebrook kept on cautiously, squirming his long body in sinuous waves like a lizard's through the grass, and was soon lost to us. No snake could have been lither .
Etymology 2
From (etyl) lither, lyther, luther, lithere, lidder, from (etyl) . See (l).Adjective
(en adjective)- Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,
- Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,
- Two Talbots, winged through the lither sky,
- In thy despite shall ’scape mortality.
- After the same manner a monk--I mean those lither , idle, lazy monks--doth not labour and work, as do the peasant and artificer; doth not ward and defend the country, as doth the man of war; cureth not the sick and diseased, as the physician doth; doth neither preach nor teach, as do the evangelical doctors and schoolmasters; doth not import commodities and things necessary for the commonwealth, as the merchant doth.
- Secondarily, let him which laboreth in his vocation be prompt and active; let him be watchful and able to abide labour; he must be no lither -back1, unapt, or slothful fellow. Whatever he doth, that let him do with faith2 and diligence.
- Thus he sketched an education which might have befitted a great king, without a word of ribaldry or scorn, and in such a spirit as proves that he gravely condemned the lazy, lither system of the monasteries.