rhapsodize

verb

Etymology: Etymology tree English rhapsody Proto-Indo-European *-id- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *-idyéti Proto-Hellenic *-íďďō Ancient Greek -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō)bor. Late Latin -izōder. Middle French -iserbor. Middle English -isen English -ize English rhapsodize From rhapsody + -ize.

1. To speak with exaggerated or rapturous enthusiasm (about, (up)on or over something).

   “The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! […] You will think me rhapsodizing; but when I am out of doors, especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain.”

   “How can one rhapsodise over a view when surrounded by beer-stained tables? How lose one’s self in historical reverie amid the odour of roast veal and spinach?”

2. To say (something) with exaggerated or rapturous enthusiasm.

   ““It’s a long time since I tasted such a borshtch! Simply a vivifier! It melts in every limb!”" he kept rhapsodizing, between mouthfuls. “It ought to be sent to the Chicago Exposition. The missess would get a medal.””

   ““Listen, my pearl,” he rhapsodized. “I have money now and you shall have dresses like rainbows, a gold tiara and slave girls to wait on you […]””

3. To recount or describe (something) as a rhapsody, or in the manner of a rhapsody.

   “The campaigns themselves will take up as many books; and therefore I apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight of one kind of matter in so flimsy a performance as this, to rhapsodize them, as I once intended, into the body of the work […]”

   “The great poetry of the opening chapter of Ulysses […] amplifies and rhapsodizes the world with an unlooked-for accuracy and transport.”

4. To perform a rhapsody.

   “[…] Carolan, the last of the Irish bards, rhapsodized in the halls of the O’Connors so lately as the year 1730.”

   “Should one gather statistics of the enormous production of poetry some sixty or seventy years ago, they would scarcely appear credible. Journals and magazines teemed with it. Editors openly countenanced it. Even the daily press affected it. Love sighed in home-made stanzas. Patriotism rhapsodized on the hustings, or cited rolling hexameters to an enraptured legislature.”