To overhang, to threaten, to jut over (Anglo-Saxon, beot-ian, to menace). Hence beetle or beetled brow.
“Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff,
That beetles oʹer his base into the sea.”
Shakespeare: Hamlet, i. 4.
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.
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