knit one's brow

knit one's brow (third-person singular simple present knits one's brow, present participle knitting one's brow, simple past and past participle knit one's brow or knitted one's brow)

1. Alternative form of knit one's brows.
   • 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i], page 130, column 2:

     But meet him now, and be it in the Morne, / When euery one will giue the time of day, / He knits his Brow and ſhewes an angry Eye, / And paſſeth by with ſtiffe vnbowed Knee, / Diſdaining dutie that to vs belongs.

   • 1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter LVII, in Middlemarch […], volume III, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book VI, page 266:

     "Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others," said Mrs Garth. She did not mean to go beyond this salutary general doctrine, and threw her indignation into a needless unwinding of her worsted, knitting her brow at it with a grand air.

   • 1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter 3, in Jeeves in the Offing, Harmondsworth, Middlesex [London]: Penguin Books, published 1963 (1975 printing), →OCLC, pages 25–26:

     This duologue had, of course, left Wilbert Cream a bit out of it, just painted on the backdrop as you might say, and for some moments, knitting his brow, plucking at his moustache, shuffling the feet and allowing the limbs to twitch, he had been giving abundant evidence that in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all that a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters [myself].