Other forms: beseeching, beseeches, beseeched
To beseech is to beg somebody urgently. I beseech you, beseeching him to stay, a beseeching look.
It is archaic and deliberately so: it belongs to prayer, to Shakespeare and to formal pleading, and anybody using it now is reaching for weight. Beseeching as an adjective survives better than the verb — a beseeching look. The past tense is besought or beseeched, and both are correct, with besought the older and more literary. Note that beseech is beg with the seriousness turned up rather than a synonym.
1verbbeseechTo beg somebody urgently.
“"Please, I beseech you, spare my son!" the old woman cried to the king.”
beseech is an urgent begging.
Also accepted in games: implore
be-SEECH → a SPEECH
He makes the same speech at her door every night, on his knees on the step, asking for one more chance.
hooks ontospeech
Middle English besechen is be- plus the old form of seek. To beseech is to seek thoroughly, and the German besuchen, to visit, is the same compound gone a different way.
Old English
sēċan — to seek or inquire about
Middle English
besechen
English, today
beseech
From Middle English besechen, bisechen, prefixed form of Old English sēċan (“to seek or inquire about”); compare the doublet a doublet of beseek, from the same dialect that gave seek. Cognate with stq besäike (“to visit”), Dutch bezoeken (“to visit, attend, see”), German besuchen (“to visit, attend, see”), Swedish besöka (“to visit, go to see”). by surface analysis, be- + seech.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA