Other forms: dwelling, dwells, dwelt, dwelled
To dwell is a poetic word for living somewhere. Dwell in the hills, where they dwell, dwelling place.
It is archaic in that sense outside poetry and hymns, though dwelling survives as the legal and planning word for a home: a dwelling house, nine dwellings. The live sense of the verb is dwell on, meaning to keep thinking or talking about something painful: do not dwell on it, dwelt on the failure. Note dweller, as in city dweller; and that dwell time is a technical term for how long something stays in place.
1verbliveTo live somewhere, in poetic use.
“According to the legend, a dragon dwells in the cave beneath the mountain.”
2verbdwellTo keep thinking or talking about something painful.
“Don't dwell on your mistakes; learn from them and move on.”
dwell is a living or lingering.
Old English dwellan meant to mislead or to delay, from a root about confusion. The meaning drifted from leading astray to lingering to living somewhere, which is a long journey for one verb.
Middle English
dwellen
English, today
dwell
Built from
From Middle English dwellen. From Middle English dwellen (“delay, live, remain, persist”), from Old English dwellan (“to mislead, deceive; be led into error, stray”), from Proto-Germanic dwaljaną (“to hold up, delay; hesitate”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰwelH- (“to whirl, swirl, blur, obfuscate”), which is cognate with Old Norse dvelja and related to Proto-Germanic dwelaną (“to go astray”), which underwent semantic change in its descendants. Cognates include Danish dvæle (“to linger, dwell”) and Swedish dväljas (“to dwell, reside”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA