cumberworld
See also: cumber-world
English
Alternative forms
Noun
cumberworld (plural cumberworlds)
- (obsolete, derogatory) A useless person or thing; someone who is an encumbrance on the world.
- c. 1385, Chaucer, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseyde, lines 279–280:
- I, combre-world, that may of nothyng serve, / But evere dye and nevere fulli sterve.
- c. 1412, Hoccleve, Thomas, A Lament for Chaucer, lines 35–38; republished in Pancoast, Henry Spackman; Spaeth, John Duncan Ernst, editors, Early English Poems, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, page 242:
- Thou followedst sure, this men know well enow, / That cumber-world, that thee, my master slow, / I would were slain! death went too hastily / To run on thee, and rive thy life of thee.
- 1593, Drayton, Michael, Idea: The Shepherd's Garland:
- A cumber-world, yet in the world am left, / A fruitles plot, with brambles overgrown: Of all those joys, that pleas'd my youth, bereft, / And now too late my folly but bemoan.
- 1894, Wylie, James Hamilton, History of England under Henry the Fourth, volume 2, pages 22–23:
- His pouch was now all void and empty, his future years were like to be sour, thoughty, and woe-begone, and himself a cumberworld, unsicker of his scarce and slender livelihood in lickpenny London, forced to beg, steal, or starve, and gaping after honest death.
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Synonyms
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