Overcome vs Overgo - What's the difference?
overcome | overgo |
To surmount (a physical or abstract obstacle); to prevail over, to get the better of.
:to overcome enemies in battle
*Spenser
*:This wretched woman overcome / Of anguish, rather than of crime, hath been.
*1898 , , (Moonfleet), Ch.4:
*:By and by fumes of brandy began to fill the air, and climb to where I lay, overcoming the mouldy smell of decayed wood and the dampness of the green walls.
(obsolete) To win (a battle).
*:
*:Ther with all cam kyng Arthur but with a fewe peple and slewe on the lyfte hand and on the ryght hand that wel nyhe ther escaped no man / but alle were slayne to the nombre of xxx M / And whan the bataille was all ended the kynge kneled doune and thanked god mekely / and thenne he sente for the quene and soone she was come / and she maade grete Ioye of the ouercomynge of that bataille
To win or prevail in some sort of battle, contest, etc.
:
*
, chapter=2, title= (usually in passive) To overwhelm with emotion.
:
To come or pass over; to spread over.
*Shakespeare
*:And overcome us like a summer's cloud.
To overflow; to surcharge.
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(obsolete) To pass (a figurative barrier); to transgress.
*1882 , John Payne, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night , vol 3:
*:How many an one in its vanities hath gloried and taken pride, / Till froward and arrogant thus he grew and did all bounds o'ergo !
*1818 , John Keats, Endymion , II:
*:He did not rave, he did not stare aghast, / For all those visions were o'ergone , and past [...].
To spread across (something); to overrun.
To go over, move over the top of, travel across the surface of; to traverse, travel through.
*1590 , Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , III.iii:
*:forward rode, and kept her readie way / Along the strond, which as she ouer-went , / She saw bestrowed all with rich aray / Of pearles and pretious stones of great assay [...].
*1625 , Francis Bacon, The Praise of Knowledge :
*:The fixed stars overgo Saturn, and so in them and all the rest, all is but one motion, and the nearer the earth the slower – a motion also whereof air and water do participate, though much interrupted.
To go beyond; to exceed, surpass.
*1597 , William Shakespeare, Richard III , II.2:
*:O, what cause have I, / Thine being but a moiety of my grief, / To overgo thy plaints and drown thy cries!
*1992 , Domna C Stanton, Discourses of Sexuality , p. 177:
*:He seeks to persuade the queen not merely to emulate the Amazons' vigilant territoriality but to overgo them by emulating the Spaniards' rampant invasiveness.
To get the better of; to overcome, overpower.
*1594 , Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage , Act I:
*:Both barking Scylla, and the sounding rocks, / The Cyclops' shelves, and grim Ceraunia's seat, / Have you o'ergone , and yet remain alive.
(obsolete) To overtake, go faster than.
*1598 , George Chapman, trans. Homer, Iliad , book VI:
*:If it chance, that we be overgone / By his more swiftness, urge him still to run upon our fleet, / And (lest he 'scape us to the town) still let thy javelin meet / With all his offers of retreat.
(genetics) A sequence of overlapping oligonucleotides, used to design hybridization.
*1999 , Birren & Green, Genome Analysis , p. 207:
*:Mixtures of such specific "overgo " probes can be used to screen arrayed library filters by DNA-DNA hybridization [...].
*2004 , Detrich, Westerfield & Zon, The Zebrafish: Genetics, Genomics and Informatics , p. 318:
*:Hybridization of multiple overgoes produces many clones, perhaps 40 clones at a time.
As verbs the difference between overcome and overgo
is that overcome is to surmount (a physical or abstract obstacle); to prevail over, to get the better of while overgo is to cross, go over (a barrier etc.); to surmount.As a noun overgo is
a sequence of overlapping oligonucleotides, used to design hybridization.overcome
English
Verb
The Mirror and the Lamp, passage=That the young Mr. Churchills liked—but they did not like him coming round of an evening and drinking weak whisky-and-water while he held forth on railway debentures and corporation loans. Mr. Barrett, however, by fawning and flattery, seemed to be able to make not only Mrs. Churchill but everyone else do what he desired. And if the arts of humbleness failed him, he overcame you by sheer impudence.}}
