blee
Expressing disgust or trepidation.
Interjection
- Expressing disgust or trepidation.
- Bikers […] tend to appear at the edges of the road and then zoom in front of your car. […] As you have probably found out already, one touch of these and it's time to order the wooden box. (Blee!) - 1988, Sinclair User,...
- It's a boring life being a cave man. No telly, no video and not even a Spectrum! Blee! All you can do is eat, but Brontosaurus steaks can be very tough. - 1991, Nick Roberts, Cavemania (video game review) in Crash...
Origin
Associated with Smash Hits magazine, where it may have originated.
Noun
- Color, hue.
- Then the captain, young Lord Leigh, with his eyes so grey of blee,— / Toll slowly. - 1850, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Rhyme of the Duchess May”, in Poems. … In Two Volumes, new edition, volume II, London: Chapman &...
- IT was a Mothering Sunday ; / The sky was clear to see / Above the white, white snowdrop, / And the crocus of golden blee. - 1893, “A Story of Mothering Sunday.”, in The Sunday at Home, volume 40, Religious Tract...
- The captain wonderful to see / With eyes a-change in depth and blee; / A-change, a-change for ever and aye, / Blue, and purple, and black, and gray; / And hair like the weed that finds a home / In the depth of a trail...
- Color of the face, complexion, coloring.
- "The Felon Sow of Rokeby and the Freers of Richmond", in Christopher Clarkson, The History of Richmond, in the County of York, Thomas Bowman (publ., 1821, appendix, cvii. The sew she would not Latin heare, / But rudely...
- "The Gay Goss-hawk", The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott: first series, containing Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Tristrem, and Dramatic Pieces, Baudry's European Library (publ.), 1838, page 189 (glossed as...
- Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and...
- Consistency, form, texture.
- I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings / Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee: / And earth's soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs, / Like a madrepore...
- General resemblance, likeness; appearance, aspect, look.
- 16th c., Nicholas Grimald, The life and poems of Nicholas Grimald, Yale Studies in English, Volume 69, 1925, page 379. Meane beautie doth soone fade: therof playn hee, / Who nothing loves in woman, but her blee.
- BLEE, s[ubstantive] general resemblance, not "colour and complexion," as the dictt. [dictionaries in general] give it; Mr. Nares asserts that it was obsolete in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. If so, we have a very...
Origin
From Middle English blee, ble, from Old English blēo, bleoh (“color, hue; complexion, form”), from Proto-West Germanic *blīu (“color, blee”). Cognate with Scots ble, blee, blie (“color, complexion”), Old Frisian blī, blie (“color, hue; complexion”) (whence North Frisian bläy, Saterland Frisian Bläier), Middle Dutch blie, blye (“color”). Doublet of bly.