Definition of "invest"

He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck.

1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Cannot find one this girdle to invest!

1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 4, canto 5, verse 18

Night / Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes

1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 207-8

Madam, whatſoeuer you eſteemeOf this ſucceſſe, and loſſe vnualued,Both may inueſt you Empreſſe of the Eaſt: […]

c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire, London: Scolar Press, 1973, (please specify the page)

I do invest you jointly with my power.

c. 1603–06, William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 1, scene 1

For he saith, if there can be found such an inequality between man and man, as there is between man and beast, or between soul and body, it investeth a right of government: which seemeth rather an impossible case than an untrue sentence.

a. 1626, Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War

The scene was not without a mixture of awe such as must always invest the spectacle of the guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at it.

1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 35, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, page 171

When she related that a band of fanatics, after robbing a church of all its silver-plate, and burning the adjacent vicarage, drunk with their success, had invested the Castle, and cried aloud for ‘the man’ to be brought unto them, that he might be hewed to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal—[…]her young hearers felt a deep stirring of the heart,—a proud yet mellowed elation that never yet was felt by the reader of a written history, though its pages were as legitimate as any sanctioned by the royal licenser at Madrid.

1820, [Charles Robert Maturin], Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. […], volume IV, Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Company, and Hurst, Robinson, and Co., […], page 216

From early on in his career, Zola's work as a critic revealed just how heavily he was invested in the literary “dream of stone.”

2004, Michael D. Garval, A Dream of Stone, University of Delaware Press, page 214

She knew from watching him grow up that he didn't let that many people too close to him, but once he did, he was invested in that relationship.

2014, Sarah Varland, Tundra Threat: Faith in the Face of Crime, Harlequin, page 107

We decided that it was because he trusted the core beliefs of the Conservative Party, and he was invested in their vision of change in the NorthWest of England where he comes from.

2015, James Graham, Tory Boyz, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 11

The outcome also makes it very difficult for Feijóo to become the next PM, because he does not have the support to be invested as such, unless there are changes in the initial positions of key players such as the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV).

2023 July 24, Carlos Cué, “In Spain, the left's resistance thwarts a PP-Vox majority and leaves all possibilities open”, in El País‎, retrieved 2023-08-06