also 3–7 abime, abyme 5–7 abysme; 6–7 abisme, abism. [a. OFr. abisme, abime (cogn. w. Pr. abisme, Sp. abismo):—late pop. L. *abyssimus, a superlative of abyssus, lit. the profoundest depth; see ABYSS. Abime, which appears earlier in Eng., represents the Fr. pronunciation from 10th c., now also the mod. Fr. spelling abîme. Probably abisme was at first merely an artificial spelling, in imitation of the Fr.; we find abisme rhyming with time as late as 1616; the modern pronunciation follows the spelling.]
1. prop. The great deep, the bottomless gulf, believed in the old cosmogony to lie beneath the earth, and supposed to be, specifically: b. an imaginary subterraneous reservoir of waters; c. hell, or the ‘bottomless pit,’ the ‘infernal regions.’
c. 1300. Cursor Mundi, 22678 (Cotton MS.). Aboue þe erth and beneþen Right unto þe abime fra heþen [other MSS. abyme].
1490. Caxton, Eneydos, xi. 43. I desire and wysshe that erste thabysme of thobscure erthe swalowe me.
c. 1530. Ld. Berners, Arthur of Lytell Bryt. (1814), 43. The abysme and swalowe of the earth.
1632. Heywood, Iron Age, II. Wks. 1874, III. 409. Yet here’s a hand can rayse you, deeper cast Then to the lowest Abisme.
b. c. 1325. E. E. Allit. Poems, B. 363. Þen bolned þe abyme & bonkeȝ con ryse.
1483. Caxton, Gold. Leg., 39/4. The welles of the abysmes were broken and the cataractes of heven were opened.
a. 1834. Coleridge, Dest. Nations, Poems, 76. Or if the Greenland wizard in strange trance Pierces the untravelled realms of Ocean’s bed Over the abysm.
c. 1509. Barclay, Shyp of Folys (1874), I. 135. Sometime he punyssheth with infernall abhyme.
1606. Shaks., Ant. & Cl., III. xiii. 147. When my good Starres … Haue empty left their Orbes, and shot their Fires Into th’ Abisme of hell.
1663. Cogan, trans. Pinto’s Voy. & Adv., xli. 162. The gluttonous Serpent that lived in the profound Obism of the house of smoak.
1857–69. Heavysege, Saul (ed. 3), 418. Roll, roll away, thou Stygian smoke, And let me into the abysm look.
2. Any deep immeasurable space, a profound chasm or gulf. lit. and fig.
1495. Caxton, Vitas Patrum (W. de Worde), II. 291 aa. His Jugemens be as a grete & a depe abysme.
1610. Shaks., Temp., I. ii. 50. What seest thou els In the dark-backward and Abysme of Time?
1616. Drumm. of Hawth., Poems, 59. Feele such a case, as one whom some Abisme, In the deep Ocean kept had all his Time [in Wks. 1711, 13 printed Abime].
1653. Cogan, Diod. Siculus, 95. This river … is swallowed up in an abysme or overture of the earth.
1818. Keats, Endymion, II. 379. And down some swart abysm he had gone, Had not a heavenly guide benignant led.
1873. Masson, Drumm. of Hawth., xi. 223. He flung himself bodily into the abysm.
3. Attrib.
1818. Keats, Endym., III. 28. The abysm-birth of elements.
