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outleant

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Leaned outward or extended in a leaning position. Here, the land’s features are imagined as a corpse stretched out beneath the sky.

Detailed Definition
“Outleant” is a rare, archaic form related to “outlean.” Hardy uses it to make the winter landscape appear like the extended body of the dead century, reinforcing the poem’s bleak personification of nature and history.
Example
Example in poetry:
Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”: “The land’s sharp features seemed to be / The Century’s corpse outleant”; Outleant means leaned outward or projected beyond something; Hardy’s compressed participle makes the winter landscape seem like a corpse; “A broken fence outleant above the lane” imitates the word’s archaic, visual force
Additional Notes
The quoted word is an uncommon archaic verb form that many modern readers would need to look up.; Found in the poem, The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Also Known As
outleaning extending protruding jutting
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