CUMBER

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does cumber mean? 

• CUMBER (verb)
  The verb CUMBER has 1 sense:

1. restrict (someone or something) so as to make free movement difficult

  Familiarity information: CUMBER used as a verb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CUMBER (verb)

Present simple: I / you / we / they cumber    ... he / she / it cumbers   
Past simple: cumbered   
Past participle: cumbered   
-ing form: cumbering   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Restrict (someone or something) so as to make free movement difficult

Classified under:

Verbs of touching, hitting, tying, digging

Synonyms:

cumber; encumber; restrain

Hypernyms (to "cumber" is one way to...):

bound; confine; limit; restrict; throttle; trammel (place limits on (extent or amount or access))

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "cumber"):

bridle (put a bridle on)

curb (keep to the curb)

clog (impede the motion of, as with a chain or a burden)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

 Context examples 

It was a wild chaos where axe and sword rose and fell, while Englishman, Norman, and Italian staggered and reeled on a deck which was cumbered with bodies and slippery with blood.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Her paradise was not a tranquil one, for the little woman fussed, was over-anxious to please, and bustled about like a true Martha, cumbered with many cares.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

One day, however, as she put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus—Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell: this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic's burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one—let me break away, and go home to God!'

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)