accost

verb

1. (transitive)To approach and speak to boldly or aggressively, as with a demand or request.

   “A beggar accosted me as soon as I stepped outside.”

2. (obsolete, transitive)To join side to side; to border.
3. (broadly, obsolete, transitive)To sail along the coast or side of.
4. (obsolete, transitive)To approach; to come up to.

   “You mistake, knight. ‘Accost’ is front / her, board her, woo her, assail her.”

5. (transitive)To speak to first; to address; to greet.

   “Him, Satan thus accosts.”

   “She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to accost her; to make some request—"She hasted, let down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink."”

   “I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly.”

6. (intransitive, obsolete)To adjoin; to lie alongside.

   “For all the Shores, which to the Sea accost”

   “Lapland hath since been often surrounded (so much as accosts the sea) by the English.”

7. (transitive)To assault.

   “The Missouri prosecutors' case against Clemons, based partly on incriminating testimony given by his co-defendants, was that Clemons was part of a group of four youths who accosted the sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge one dark night in April 1991.”

   “Surveillance video of the incident shows the man and woman being accosted by a man armed with and assault-style handgun.”

8. (transitive)To solicit sexually.

   “Gladstone's initial tone of disinterested philanthropy also characterized his first encounters with prostitutes in London once he has moved there to undertake his parliamentary duties. Accosted in a London park in 1837 by two women, Gladstone merely reported of them that "both ... had taken to their miserable calling from losing their livelihood by the death of their husbands."”

noun

1. (rare)Address; greeting.

   “A man does not seize a woman by the sleeve and ask, "Is it you?" without some reason for an address so destitute of ordinary courtesy; and Lucilla was sufficiently versed in such matters to know that so rude and startling an accost could be only addressed to some one whose presence set the speaker's heart beating, and quickened the blood in his veins.”

   “Anne liked to accost foreigners in their own tongue , but , being ignorant of Spanish , asked M. de Grignaux to teach her a sentence of polite accost in his own language, wherewith to welcome an ambassador from Spain.”

   “Great was my amazement to find the unconquerable Mr. Sim thaw immediately on the accost of this strange gentleman, who hailed him with a ready familiarity, proceeded at once to discuss with him the trade of droving and the prices of cattle, and did not disdain to take a pinch from the inevitable ram's horn.”

2. An attack.

   “At last, when I was already within reach of her, I stopped. Words were denied me; if I advanced I could but clasp her to my heart in silence; and all that was sane in me, all that was still unconquered, revolted against the thought of such an accost.”