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uncountable
(rare or dialectal) One's age, age in years, period of life. quotations
The experience of many years gave old men peculiar qualification for various offices; and elders, or men of a ripe or advanced eld or age, were variously employed under the Mosaic law.
1868, John Eadie, A Biblical Cyclopædia
Promptly appeared a paragon, aged twenty-five or thereabouts, and exhibiting all the steadiness and serenity of advanced eld.
1913, Paulist Fathers, Catholic World
(archaic or poetic) Old age, senility; an old person. quotations
Taught he not thee—the man of eld, / Whose eyes within his eyes beheld / Heaven's numerous hierarchy span / The mystic gulf from God to man?
1847, R[alph] W[aldo] Emerson, “Threnody”, in Poems, Boston, Mass.: James Munroe and Company, page 245
As some true chief of men, bowed down with stressOf life's disastrous eld, on blossoming youthMay gaze, and murmur with self-pity and ruth […]
1904, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sun's Shame, verse 2, lines 1–3
The withered limbs of eld, the thin, gray hair […]
1912, Herbert Van Allen Ferguson, Rhymes of Eld
the alien wife / No crown of honour was as eld drew on.
1912, Arthur S[anders], transl. Way, Medea, Heinemann, translation of Medea by Euripides, published 1946, page 329
(archaic or poetic) Time; an age, an indefinitely long period of time.
(archaic or poetic) Former ages, antiquity, olden times. quotations
Once adown the dewy way a youthful cavalier spurred with a maiden mounted behind him, swiftly passing out of sight, recalling to the imagination some romance of eld, when the damosel fled with her lover.
1891, Mary Noailles Murfree, In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska, published 2005, page 38
comparative elder, superlative eldest
(obsolete) Old.
third-person singular simple present elds, present participle elding, simple past and past participle elded
(intransitive, archaic, poetic or dialectal) To age, become or grow old.
(intransitive, archaic or poetic) To delay; linger.
(transitive, archaic or poetic) To make old, age.