Other forms: swooning, swoons, swooned
To swoon is to collapse dreamily from emotion — or to melt with adoration. Both are half serious at most.
The fainting sense is genuinely old and belongs to a period when tight corsets made it a real occurrence, and it survives in historical fiction. The modern sense is almost entirely about admiration, so swooning over a singer is enthusiastic rather than medical. The noun is a swoon, and swoonsome exists as a joke. Faint is the plain word for the physical event.
1verbovercomeTo be overcome with admiration or emotion.
“Half the audience will swoon the moment he walks on.”
2verbswoonTo faint from emotion.
“The heroine tends to swoon at every crisis.”
dated in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
Also accepted in games: faint
Swoon began as a past participle. Old English ġeswōgen meant senseless or insensible, from swōgan, to overrun or suffocate, and English later built a fresh verb out of the state.
Middle English
swoune
English, today
swoon
From Middle English swoune, swone, from the verb (see below).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 37 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word