Weist

Weist

Verb (archaic) · /wiːst/ · past tense of the obsolete verb "to weie" — meaning: knew, was aware of

Definition

Weist is an archaic past-tense form found in Northern English and Scottish dialect texts, functioning as the first and third person singular past tense of the now-obsolete verb "to weie" or "to wit" — meaning to know, to be aware of, or to understand. Where modern English says "I knew" or "he was aware," older dialect speech said "I weist" or "he weist." The word is closely kin to the Old English verb witan, itself the ancestor of modern "wit" and the legal phrase "to wit" (namely; that is to say).

Historical note

Weist surfaces in manuscript glossaries from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in several Northern English verse romances of the same period. By the early modern era it had retreated entirely from print, surviving only in regional speech and in antiquarian word-lists compiled by dialect collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is cognate with German wusste (knew) and Dutch wist (knew), both descendants of the same Proto-Germanic root.