entomb

• intomb (obsolete)

From Old French entomber (“deposit in a tomb”). Equivalent to en- +‎ tomb.

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈtuːm/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -uːm

entomb (third-person singular simple present entombs, present participle entombing, simple past and past participle entombed) (transitive)

1. To deposit (a corpse) in a tomb.
   • 2007, Phil Macdonald, Taiwan, 2nd edition, National Geographic Society, →ISBN, page 122, column 1:

     At Cihhu (Cihu), near the town of Dasi (Daxi), 30 miles (50 km) southwest of Taipei on Provincial Highway 7, Chiang Kai-shek lies entombed above ground in a granite and marble coffin in one of his former country villas. The gravesite is “temporary,” as before his death Chiang had requested his body be returned to his native province of Zhejiang in mainland China.

2. (figurative) To confine (someone or something) in restrictive surroundings.
   • 1594, William Shakespeare, Lucrece (First Quarto), London: […] Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, […], →OCLC, signature H3, verso:

     You mocking Birds (quoth ſhe) your tunes intombe / VVithin your hollovv ſvvelling feathered breaſts, / […] / Raliſh your nimble notes to pleaſing eares, / Diſtres likes dũps vvhẽ [dumps when] time is kept vvith teares.

     A dump is a melancholy strain or tune in music.

   • 2020 July 29, Paul Stephen, “A new collaboration centred on New Street”, in Rail, page 54:

     [A]fter the original Victorian station was demolished and then entombed in concrete in the 1960s, Birmingham New Street became a byword for the worst excesses of the much-loathed Brutalist architecture so widely used to reconstruct inner-city post-war Britain.