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The Latin word suffendere, ancestor to suffuse by way of Latin suffūsus, has various meanings that shed light on our modern word, among them "to pour on or in (as an addition)" and "to fill with a liquid, color, or light that wells up from below." It’s no surprise, then, that suffuse refers to the action of fluid or light spreading over or through something, as when light fills a dark room when you crack open a door. Suffundere is a blend of the prefix sub- ("under" or "beneath") and the verb fundere ("to pour" or "to send forth"). Other English verbs related to fundere continue the theme of pouring or spreading: diffuse ("to pour out and spread freely"), effuse ("to pour or flow out"), transfuse ("to cause to pass from one to another"), and the verb fuse itself when it's used to mean "to meld or join."
Examples of suffuse in a Sentence
Martin Fritz Huber, Outside, 6 Nov. 2025
One of the great pleasures of anime is that its unabashed, rollicky genre pieces are often suffused with grand, but not grandiose, sociopolitical commentary — a heady combination that many similar pictures can’t pull off.
—Declan Gallagher, Entertainment Weekly, 30 Oct. 2025
Smith suffuses the book with a kind of clinical detachment, even as the dread mounts with each page.
—Brian Truitt, USA Today, 22 Oct. 2025
His music, stuffed with live instrumentation and harmonic sophistication, is suffused with the sound and spirit of Sly Stone, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye, among many others.
—Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, 14 Oct. 2025
See All Example Sentences for suffuse
Cite this Entry
“Suffuse.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suffuse. Accessed 18 Nov. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
suffuse
verb
Medical Definition
suffuse
transitive verb
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