impend

Borrowed from Latin impendere (“to hang over, to weigh out”), 1590s.^[1]

• IPA^(key): /ɪmˈpɛnd/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛnd

impend (third-person singular simple present impends, present participle impending, simple past and past participle impended)

1. (obsolete) To hang or be suspended over (something); to overhang.
   • 1789, John Moore, Zeluco, Valancourt, published 2008, page 210:

     The Earl had often heard of a rich citizen […] and the peculiar charm of a little snug rotunda which he had just finished on the verge of his ground, and which impended the great London road.

   • 1857, Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, “עַל (Strong's H5921) definition (A)(3)(a)”, in Gesenius' Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, retrieved 27 September 2015:

     when a thing really impends over another, e.g. when one stands at a fountain (עַל־עֵין), over which one really leans
     When a thing really impends over another, e.g. when one stands at a fountain (עַל־עֵין), over which one really leans.

2. (intransitive, figurative) To hang over (someone) as a threat or danger.
3. (intransitive) To threaten to happen; to be about to happen, to be imminent.

   impending doom

   • 1852, Herman Melville, Pierre; or The Ambiguities:

     I, the mother of the only surnamed Glendinning, I feel now as though I had borne the last of a swiftly to be extinguished race. For swiftly to be extinguished is that race, whose only heir but so much as impends upon a deed of shame.

   • 1974, Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited:

     Although much is seriously wrong with the city, no disaster impends

4. (obsolete) To pay.

• Mendip