To make something bright or illuminate it as if with the coming of dawn; to dawn upon.
Combining the prefix 'be-' with 'dawn,' following the same pattern as 'bedaub.' The word is literary and archaic, reflecting older English when the 'be-' prefix was more productive in creating new verbs.
This word captures something that modern English has largely lost—the ability to easily create poetic verbs by adding 'be-' to nouns or other verbs. Shakespeare used this productively to coin words like 'befriend' and 'besmirch,' and 'bedawn' shows that writers once thought of the prefix as a creative tool for language.
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