English Dictionary

OVERGROWN

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IPA (US): 

 Dictionary entry overview: What does overgrown mean? 

OVERGROWN (adjective)
  The adjective OVERGROWN has 2 senses:

1. covered with growing plantsplay

2. abounding in usually unwanted vegetationplay

  Familiarity information: OVERGROWN used as an adjective is rare.


 Dictionary entry details 


OVERGROWN (adjective)


Sense 1

Meaning:

Covered with growing plants

Similar:

covered (overlaid or spread or topped with or enclosed within something; sometimes used as a combining form)


Sense 2

Meaning:

Abounding in usually unwanted vegetation

Similar:

wooded (covered with growing trees and bushes etc)


 Context examples 


Out of the tangled scrub on the old overgrown barrow two human faces were looking out at him; the sinking sun glimmered full upon them, showing up every line and feature.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A disease in which the alveoli (tiny air sacs at the end of the bronchioles in the lungs) are overgrown with fibrous tissue.

(Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, NCI Dictionary)

Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Before two years passed, the rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly side by side under one slab. (I have seen their grave; it formed part of the pavement of a huge churchyard surrounding the grim, soot-black old cathedral of an overgrown manufacturing town in —shire.) They left a daughter, which, at its very birth, Charity received in her lap—cold as that of the snow-drift I almost stuck fast in to-night.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

But, by these ten finger-bones! it is a passing strange thing to me to think that it was but in the last fall of the leaf that we walked from Lyndhurst together, he so gentle and maidenly, and you, John, like a great red-limbed overgrown moon-calf; and now here you are as sprack a squire and as lusty an archer as ever passed down the highway from Bordeaux, while I am still the same old Samkin Aylward, with never a change, save that I have a few more sins on my soul and a few less crowns in my pouch.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)



 Learn English with... Proverbs 
"No man is content with his lot." (English proverb)

"He who digs someone else's grave shall fall in it himself." (Bulgarian proverb)

"With a soft tongue you can even pull a snake out of its nest." (Armenian proverb)

"From children and drunks will you hear the truth." (Danish proverb)



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