Impede, burden

Usage examples of encumber.

Encumbered by their bulky decontamination suits, slowed by the curved floor of the pipe, they ran in a lurching shuffle.

He had seen her returning in her little pony-carriage from the window of his dressing-room, wrapped in a kind of nunlike ulster with large sleeves, and he had also noticed that she wore a small crucifix at her waist, and that, in addition to the frills and ribands with which she always seemed to be encumbered, there was a jasper rosary round her neck on the Friday of her arrival.

Expertly she applied herself, and as the encumbering layers of lacquered platework were lifted from her mistress, Mara sighed in relief.

We are about to approach those ancient Religions which once ruled the minds of men, and whose ruins encumber the plains of the great Past, as the broken columns of Palmyra and Tadmor lie bleaching on the sands of the desert.

Walking was now more difficult, on account of the numerous rocks which encumbered the beach.

The colour party, encumbered by the heavy squares of silk, were the slowest.

The old Utopists never had to encumber themselves with this sort of man.

We got over a paling of planks almost completely destroyed, and of which barricades had probably been made, and we crossed the extensive area of half-demolished houses which at that epoch encumbered the lower portions of the Rue Montmartre and Rue Montorgueil.

People of the name of Tupman, very lately settled there, and encumbered with many low connexions, but giving themselves immense airs, and expecting to be on a footing with the old established families.

In reconsidering our relation to attention, given the paucity of our own scientific resources, it is only reasonable to look beyond our own contemporary society to the wisdom of earlier eras of our own culture and to other cultures that have not been encumbered by the dominant ideology that so constrains modern scientific and medical research.

And the configuration of that microcosm also determines just what the encumbered soul perceives of the universe.

You throw in a few drops of that fluid which perfumes and softens the skin, and like a nymph in the depths of a quiet wood preparing for the toilet, you remove the drapery that might encumber you.

We had not been divided off into companies, and were encumbered with blankets, tents, cooking utensils, wood, etc.

Painfully hampered, cruelly encumbered, Richard staggered on, the brown base under his arm as heavy as a soaked log, the T-shaped adjunct in his free hand, the tartan flex-tube round his neck like a fat scarf, and then the plug, freed from its broken catchlet, incensingly adangle between his legs.

Tex Goldman mob, he had done very little more than could have been done by any detective with an original turn of mind and an equal freedom from responsibility to the stolidly unimaginative Powers who draw princely salaries for encumbering with red tape and ballyhoo the perfectly simple process of locating ungodliness and smacking it on the nose.