Archaic or dialect term meaning to cause to pine away, waste away, or languish from suffering or longing.
From Old English for- (completely, excessively) + pine (to suffer, waste away). The prefix intensified the verb, suggesting extreme suffering or wasting, common in Middle English poetry.
Medieval poets loved 'forpine'—it was the go-to word for romantic anguish and emotional wasting, making it the melancholic cousin of modern 'dying of love' that actually sounds more poetically tragic.
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