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embolden

UK/ɛmˈbəʊld(ə)n/US/ɛmˈboʊld(ə)n/
verbC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #15,016 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: emboldened, emboldening, emboldens

To embolden is to give somebody the courage to act. Emboldened by success, embolden the rebels, embolden his critics.

It is nearly always used of the wrong people being encouraged — a weak response emboldens an aggressor, and that is the standard use in political writing. In typesetting, to embolden text is simply to make it bold.

Definitions of embolden

  1. 1verbemboldenTo give somebody the courage to act.C1

    “Her early success emboldened her to open a second shop.”

embolden is an encouraging.

Where it comes from

Bold plus the em- and -en pattern that makes a verb, as in enliven and enrich.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰel-

  2. English, today

    embolden

Built from

  • enbolden · Middle English — to make bold, encourage

From bold + em- -en (variant of en- -en). Compare Middle English embolden, enbolden (“to make bold, encourage”) (modern English embold, enbold, imbold obsolete), and inboldysshen (“to embolden, encourage”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

embolden in the wild

  • The British feared that a public trial for treason on the part of the INA members might embolden anti-British sentiment and erupt into widespread protest and violence.

    Azad Hind

  • The resulting feud served to split Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republican coalition and to embolden nativist attacks on "foreign extremists".

    John Binns (journalist)

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.