fane

English [edit]

From Latin fanum (“temple, place dedicated to a deity”).

fane (plural fanes)

A temple or sacred place.
- 1850, The Madras Journal of Literature and Science, Volume 16, page 64,
  
  Fanes are built around it for a distance of 3, 4 or 5 Indian miles; but whether these are Jaina, or more strictly Hindu is not mentioned.
- 1884, Henry David Thoreau, Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, page 78,
  
  The priests of the Germans and Britons were druids. They had their sacred oaken groves. Such were their steeple houses. Nature was to some extent a fane to them.
- 1993 [1978], H. P. Blavatsky, Boris de Zirkoff (editor), The Secret Doctrine, Volume 1: Cosmogenesis, page 458,
  
  And this ideal conception is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, however coarse and grotesque, in the crowded galleries of the sombre fanes of India and other Mother lands of cults.
(obsolete) A weathercock, a weather vane.
- 1801, John Baillie, An Impartial History of the Town and County of Newcastle Upon Tyne, page 541,
  
  The ſteeple had become old and ruinous; and therefore the preſent one was built about the year 1740. It had, at that time, four fanes mounted on ſpires, on the four corners; theſe being judged too weak for the fanes, were taken down in 1764, and the roof of the ſteeple altered.

From faner.

fane f (plural fanes)