welked, withered, faded; ‘Her wealked face with woful teares besprent’, Sackville, Mirror for Mag., Induction, st. 12. ME. welked, withered (Chaucer, C. T. D. 277).
welked, curved, twisted, applied to horns; ‘Welked horns’, Golding’s Ovid, occurring three times, pp. 60, 107, and 122 (ed. 1603); ‘Hornes welkt and waved like the enraged Sea’, King Lear, iv. 6. 71; ‘And setting fire upon the welked shrouds’ (i.e. the curved clouds), Drayton, Barons’ Wars, vi. 39 (Nares).
welkin, the sky; ‘Look on me with your welkin eye’ (i.e. heavenly or sky-blue eye), Winter’s Tale, i. 2. 136. ME. welken, the sky (Chaucer, Hous F. iii. 1601). OE. wolcen, a cloud, also wolcnan, clouds. Cp. G. wolke, a cloud.
well-a-near, alas!, alack-a-day!;
‘The poor lady shrieks, and well-a-near,
Does fall in travail with her fear,’
Pericles, iii, Prol. 51; Look about You, sc. 2, in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, vii. 397. An obsolete north-country exclamation—written well-aneer and well-an-ere (EDD.).
well-liking, in good condition, plump, L. L. L. v. 2. 268; ‘They . . . shalbe fatt and well lykenge’, Ps. xcii. 13 (Great Bible, 1539).
well said!, really meaning ‘well done!’, Westward Ho, ii. 2 (Birdlime). Common.
Welshman’s hose. Nares takes this to mean ‘no hose at all’, as denoting something non-existent or wholly indefinite; but perhaps the Welshman of the phrase was accused of wearing his ‘hose’ hind part before; ‘The lawes wee did interprete and statutes of the land, Not truely by the texte, but newly by a glose: And wordes that were most playne, when they by us were skand, Wee tourned by construction to a Welshman’s hose’, Mirror for Mag., Tresilian, st. 15.