"balefire" meaning in English

See balefire in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: balefires [plural]
Etymology: From Middle English bale-fyre, from Old English bǣlfȳr (“balefire, funeral or sacrificial fire”); equivalent to bale (“funeral pyre”) + fire. Etymology templates: {{inh|en|enm|bale-fyre}} Middle English bale-fyre, {{inh|en|ang|bǣlfȳr||balefire, funeral or sacrificial fire}} Old English bǣlfȳr (“balefire, funeral or sacrificial fire”), {{compound|en|bale|fire|t1=funeral pyre}} bale (“funeral pyre”) + fire Head templates: {{en-noun}} balefire (plural balefires)
  1. A bonfire, any large outdoor fire (for example those used in a funeral pyre, or in witches' rituals). Wikipedia link: balefire Categories (topical): Wicca Related terms: bale, fire, bonfire, pyre Translations (ritual bonfire): fogata de brujos [feminine] (Spanish)

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for balefire meaning in English (2.2kB)

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  "etymology_text": "From Middle English bale-fyre, from Old English bǣlfȳr (“balefire, funeral or sacrificial fire”); equivalent to bale (“funeral pyre”) + fire.",
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          "ref": "2002, Marilyn F. Daniel, Kitchen Witchery, Weiser, page 236",
          "text": "Rites done on a lakeshore or seashore can be illuminated with balefires of dried driftwood collected prior to the rite.",
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      "translations": [
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          "code": "es",
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      "sense": "ritual bonfire",
      "tags": [
        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "fogata de brujos"
    }
  ],
  "word": "balefire"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.