To form into a ball or bolls; to swell or cause to swell into a rounded shape, particularly of seeds or seed pods.
From 'boll' with the infinitive suffix -en, common in archaic or dialect English to indicate an action or state of becoming, related to verb formations like 'darken' or 'ripen.'
This word, while archaic in modern English, preserves an old verb-formation pattern with -en that created verbs from nouns—a system that was extremely productive in Old and Middle English but survives now only in scattered words like 'sweeten' and 'blacken.'
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