Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

aglow

US/əˈɡloʊ/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,710 of 15,258leans spoken

Aglow means shining with a warm soft light. The room was aglow, aglow with candles, faces aglow.

It comes after the noun and it is literary — things are aglow and there are no aglow things. It takes with. Of a face it means flushed with pleasure or exertion. Note that the a- here is the old form of on, as in ablaze, afire and asleep.

Definitions of aglow

  1. 1adjectiveaglowShining with a warm soft light.C1

    “The whole village was aglow with lanterns on the night of the festival.”

aglow is a state of glowing.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ǵʰleh₁-

  2. Middle English

    glouen

  3. English

    glow

  4. English, today

    aglow

Built from

  • glowen · Middle English — to give off heat and light without flame; of a thing: to be heated until red hot; to be brightly coloured; to shine brightly; (figurative) to be filled with emotion; of the face, etc.: to turn red, flush; etc.

From a- + glow. glow The is derived from Middle English glouen, glowen (“to give off heat and light without flame; of a thing: to be heated until red hot; to be brightly coloured; to shine brightly; (figurative) to be filled with emotion; of the face, etc.: to turn red, flush; etc.”), and then either:

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

aglow in the wild

  • Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.

    1914 in poetry

  • Naturally, this set the hearts of all the British owners aglow, and was instrumental in urging on the efforts of our shippers to capture the China trade.

    Challenger (clipper)

  • The chorus: In the land of the Buffalo, Where the Western breezes blow, Where the goodnight kiss of the sunlight Sets all the plains aglow.

    In the Land of the Buffalo

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the glowen family

glow

aglow — used about once every 7,127 pages · #10,710 · point at the bar for the others

  • glower