bemonster

From be- +‎ monster.

bemonster (third-person singular simple present bemonsters, present participle bemonstering, simple past and past participle bemonstered)

1. (transitive) To make monstrous or like a monster; make hideous; deform.
   • c. 1605, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, Scene 2,

     Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame!

     Bemonster not thy feature!

   • 1871, uncredited author, “Wanted for London,” All the Year Round, 25 February, 1871, p. 306,

     One would think that clothing an official with decent taste was not a herculean task: yet ask a foreigner his opinion of the poor bemonstered force which protects our lives and purses. He might suppose that Dykwynkyn, or some other of the artists who work for the pantomimes, had designed the grotesque disfigurement of these unhappy men.

   • 1880, Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Birthday Ode,” in Songs of the Springtides, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 124,

     A man by men bemonstered, but by love

     Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove [alluding to the novel The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo]

   • 1980, Barry Unsworth, Pascali’s Island, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 163,

     Little by little the naked body was assuming shape under our hands. There were no longer those disfiguring gouts of clay which had produced dread in me by bemonstering the features.

2. (transitive) To fill or cover with monsters.
   • 1812, William Tennant, Anster Fair, Edinburgh: George Goldie, 2nd edition, 1814, Canto 4, Stanza 21, p. 119,

     So leap’d the men, half-sepulchred in sack,

     Up-swinging, with their shapes be-monstring sky,

   • 1986, Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air, New York: Ballantine, Chapter 12, p. 165,

     It was one of the League’s rare open exhibitions, and nonmembers in ordinary dress thronged among the cartoon-colored pavilions, the hedges of bemonstered appliqué banners, and the blazons strung on wire between trees.

3. (transitive) To regard or treat (someone) as a monster; to call (someone) a monster.
   • 1921, R. H. Case, Review of The Percy Reprints: The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe, The Modern Language Review, Volume 16, No. 1, January 1921, p. 77,

     It […] ends with a crude but forceful intensification of the lust and blood of the Italian novella, complicated with the popular theme of scandalising the Pope and bemonstering the Jew.

• Embertons, entombers