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To encircle. [R.] The Muses and the Graces, grouped in threes, Enringed a billowing fountain in the midst. Tennyson.

A meal, or the act of eating. [R.] For such pleasure till that hour At feed or fountain never had I found. Milton.

A fountain; a spring; a source. Bathing forever in the font of bliss. Young.

Pertaining to a font, fountain, source, or origin; original; primitive. [R.] From the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power. Coleridge.

A fountain.

Full of fountains. Pope.

A flower stand, fountain, or the like, of branching form.

The source, fountain, spring, or beginning, as of a stream or river; as, the head of the Nile; hence, the altitude of the source, or the height of the surface, as of water, above a given place, as above an orifice at which it issues, and the pressure resulting from the height or from motion; sometimes also, the quantit…

Fountain; source. The headspring of our belief. Stapleton.

A fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, fabled to have burst forth when the ground was struck by the hoof of Pegasus. Also, its waters, which were supposed to impart poetic inspiration. Keats. Nor maddening draughts of Hippocrene. Longfellow.

ould diminish the present extent of the sea, so much they would impair the fertility, and fountains, and rivers of the earth. Bentley.

that, Heaven did not hold One more immaculate. Denham. Thou sheer, immaculate and silver fountain. Shak. Immaculate conception (R. C. Ch.), the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin. -- Im*mac"u*late*ly, adv. -- Im*mac"u*late*ness, n.

In an infamous manner or degree; scandalously; disgracefully; shamefully. The sealed fountain of royal bounty which had been infamously monopolized and huckstered. Burke.

A stream of water spouting from a fountain or pipe (especially from one arranged to throw water upward), in a public place or in a garden, for ornament.

ivity; joyfulness. Spenser. Some days of joyance are decreed to all. Byron. From what hid fountains doth thy joyance flow Trench.

A spring of water; hence, water, or a pure, transparent liquid like water. A fountain bubbled up, whose lymph serene Nothing of earthly mixture might distain. Trench.

tesque head or face, used to adorn keystones and other prominent parts, to spout water in fountains, and the like; -- called also mascaron.

divinities, fabled to preside over some body of fresh water, as a lake, river, brook, or fountain.

A beautiful youth fabled to have been enamored of his own image as seen in a fountain, and to have been changed into the flower called Narcissus.

That from which anything primarily proceeds; the fountain; the spring; the cause; the occasion.