bonfire

Meanings

1. A large, controlled outdoor fire lit to celebrate something or as a signal.
2. A fire lit outdoors to burn unwanted items; originally (historical), heretics or other offenders, or banned books; now, generally agricultural or garden waste, or rubbish.
3. Something like a bonfire (sense 1 or 2) in heat, destructiveness, ferocity, etc.
4. A fire lit to cremate a dead body; a funeral pyre.

1. To destroy (something) by, or as if by, burning on a bonfire; (more generally) to burn or set alight.
2. To fire (pottery) using a bonfire.
3. To start a bonfire in (a place); to light up (a place) with a bonfire.
4. To make, or celebrate around, a bonfire.

Etymology

PIE word *péh₂wr̥ From Middle English bonnefyre (“a fire in which bones are burnt, bonfire”) [and other forms], by surface analysis, bone + fire. Replaced earlier Middle English bale-fyre, from Old English bǣlfȳr (see balefire). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that bonfires, originally lit as part of midsummer celebrations, were not generally associated with the burning of bones. However, the first edition of the OED (under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 1887) stated that “for the annual midsummer ‘banefire’ or ‘bonfire’ in the burgh of Hawick [in Roxburghshire, Scotland], old bones were regularly collected and stored up, down to c. 1800”. The verb is derived from the noun. Cognate with Scots banefire (“bonfire”).