wan

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See also: Wan, WAN, wán, wàn, wān, wǎn, wan-, -wan, and Appendix:Variations of "wan"

English

WOTD – 27 March 2018

Etymology 1

A wan moon (sense 1) rising over snow-covered mountains

From Middle English wan, wanne (“grey, leaden; pale grey, ashen; blue-black (like a bruise); dim, faint; dark, gloomy”), from Old English ƿann (“dark, dusky”),[1] from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swart”), of uncertain origin. Cognate with Old Frisian wann, wonn (“dark”).

Pronunciation

  • Lua error in Module:parameters at line 290: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "RP" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. IPA(key): /wɒn/
  • Lua error in Module:parameters at line 290: Parameter 1 should be a valid language or etymology language code; the value "GA" is not valid. See WT:LOL and WT:LOL/E. IPA(key): /wɑn/
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  • Rhymes: -ɒn
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Adjective

wan (comparative wanner, superlative wannest)

  1. Pale, sickly-looking.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:pallid
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 42, page 116:
      Whome when his Lady ſaw, to him ſhe ran / With haſty ioy : to ſee him made her glad, / And ſad to view his viſage pale and wan, / Who earſt in flowres of freſhest youth was clad.
    • 1839, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Beleaguered City”, in Voices of the Night, Cambridge, Mass.: Published by John Owen, →OCLC, stanzas 1 and 2, page 22:
      I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, / There stood, as in an awful dream, / The army of the dead.
    • 1921 October, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Efficiency Expert”, in All-Story Weekly, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “The Trial”, in The Efficiency Expert, [Auckland]: The Floating Press, 2011, →ISBN, page 188:
      She looked wan and worried, and then finally she was not in court one day, and later [...] he learned that she was confined to her room with a bad cold.
  2. Dim, faint.
    • 1909, Robert W[illiam] Service, “The Ballad of One-eyed Mike”, in Ballads of a Cheechako, Toronto, Ont.: William Briggs, →OCLC, stanza 5, page 52:
      ’Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed the Prince of Gloom / For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom. / Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago; / My youth was gone and my memory wan, and I willed it even so.
  3. Bland, uninterested.
    A wan expression
    • 1867 July 13, “Lieutenant Castagnac”, in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading, Selected from Foreign Current Literature, volume IV, number 80, Cambridge, Mass.: Printed at the University Press, Cambridge, by Welch, Bigelow, & Co., for Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, chapter II, page 35:
      My position in the midst of the general indifference was hard to bear ; my silence weighed upon me like remorse. The sight of Lieutenant Castagnac filled me with indignation, — a sort of insurmountable repulsion: the wan look, the ironical smile of the man, froze my blood.
    • 2013, Carter Dreyfuss, chapter 1, in The Prince of Temple Square: A Murder Mystery, Tucson, Ariz.: Wheatmark, →ISBN, pages 8–9:
      Checking out her brother’s khakis, the gun propped in the corner, Olivia’s hiking boots and her wan expression, she wants to laugh. “Been hunting, I see.” Olivia’s face falls, as expected. Her brother’s obsession with guns and gross little expeditions appall her.
    • 2014, Chris Angus, chapter 12, in Flypaper: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Yucca Publishing, Skyhorse Publishing, →ISBN:
      “I have to admit, I’ve been tempted a time or two to chuck everything to go live in a place like this [Bogda Peak, China],” he replied. / “What stopped you?” / He gave her a wan look. “Celibacy.”
Derived terms
Translations

Noun

wan (uncountable)

  1. The quality of being wan; wanness.
    • 1847, Alfred Tennyson, “Part III”, in The Princess: A Medley, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 47:
      And while we stood beside the fount, and watch’d / Or seem’d to watch the dancing bubble, approach'd / Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep, / Or sorrow, and glowing round her dewy eyes / The circled Iris of a night of tears ; [...]

Etymology 2

Eye dialect spelling of one. Sense 2 (“girl or woman”) possibly as a result of the phrase your wan as a counterpart to your man.

Noun

wan (plural wans)

  1. Eye dialect spelling of one, representing Ireland English.
  2. (Ireland) A girl or woman.
    • 1993, Elaine Crowley, The Ways Of Women, London: Orion, →ISBN:
      Then I’d tell myself there were plenty of oul wans and oul fellas in work who never got it and that I’d be lucky like them and escape. Only I didn’t. I don’t want to die.
    • 2005, David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, →ISBN; republished as The Pope’s Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland’s New Elite, Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2008, →ISBN, page 4:
      Growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1980s, I remember all the hard men were sinewy, scrawny lads, hence the local description ‘more meat on a seagull’. The reason was simple: they were undernourished. [...] The young wans, despite a couple of babies, were more or less the same, pinched, flat-chested and drawn.
    • 2015, Kevin Maher, “A Yuletide Bender”, in Last Night on Earth, London: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN:
      He comes streaming out from under the stage, this time a feckin show-stopper, almost literally, because there’s eighty different acrobats above him, [...] for this mad New Year’s show that has no story at all, other than this wan in silky robes who goes out with this fella in silky robes, and they’re from different enemy tribes of lads and wans in silky robes, and when they find out, they have this huge, aerial, acrobatic donnybrook that ends when everyone wraps their silk around each other up in the air, and then lets it all fall down to the ground, where the audience are, to show them how we're all part of one big silky family, and not to be fighting in the future.

Etymology 3

An inflected form.

Verb

wan

  1. (obsolete) simple past and past participle of win.

References

  1. ^ “wan, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 5 January 2018.
  2. ^ Thomas Sheridan (1790) A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Both with Regard to Sound and Meaning‎[1], volume 2, C. Dilly

Anagrams

Dutch

Pronunciation

  • Audio:(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɑn

Etymology 1

Ultimately from Latin vannus.

Noun

wan f or m (plural wannen, diminutive wannetje n)

  1. winnowing basket

Etymology 2

Verb

wan

  1. (deprecated template usage) first-person singular present indicative of wannen
  2. (deprecated template usage) imperative of wannen

Gothic

Romanization

wan

  1. Romanization of 𐍅𐌰𐌽

Japanese

Romanization

wan

  1. Rōmaji transcription of わん

Mandarin

Romanization

wan

  1. Nonstandard spelling of wān.
  2. Nonstandard spelling of wán.
  3. Nonstandard spelling of wǎn.
  4. Nonstandard spelling of wàn.

Usage notes

  • Transcriptions of Mandarin into the Latin script often do not distinguish between the critical tonal differences employed in the Mandarin language, using words such as this one without indication of tone.

Middle English

Etymology 1

From Old English wann (“dark”), from Proto-Germanic *wannaz, of uncertain origin.

Adjective

wan

  1. wan (pallid, sickly)
  2. wan (dim, faint)
Alternative forms
Descendants
  • English: wan
  • Scots: wan

References

Etymology 2

Noun

wan (uncountable)

  1. Alternative form of wane (“deprivation”)

Etymology 3

Adjective

wan

  1. Alternative form of wane

Etymology 4

Noun

wan (uncountable)

  1. (Northern) Alternative form of vein (“that which is vain”)

Etymology 5

Pronoun

wan

  1. Alternative form of whan

Etymology 6

Noun

wan (plural wanes)

  1. (Northern, Early Middle English) Alternative form of wone (“dwelling”)

Etymology 7

Noun

wan (uncountable)

  1. Alternative form of wane (“woeful state”)

Etymology 8

Noun

wan (plural wanes)

  1. Alternative form of wone (“choice”)

Etymology 9

Noun

wan (plural wanes)

  1. Alternative form of wayn (“wagon”)

Etymology 10

Verb

wan (third-person singular simple present waneth, present participle wanende, wanynge, first-/third-person singular past indicative and past participle waned)

  1. Alternative form of wanen

Etymology 11

Adverb

wan

  1. Alternative form of whenne

Conjunction

wan

  1. Alternative form of whenne

Etymology 12

Adverb

wan

  1. Alternative form of whanne

Conjunction

wan

  1. Alternative form of whanne

Etymology 13

Verb

wan

  1. Alternative form of wanne: singular simple past of winnen
  2. Alternative form of wonnen: plural simple past of winnen

Nigerian Pidgin

Etymology

From English want.

Verb

wan

  1. want, want to

Noone

Noun

wan (plural boom)

  1. child

References

North Frisian

Etymology

From Old Frisian winna, which derives from Proto-Germanic *winnaną.

Verb

wan

  1. (Föhr-Amrum Dialect) to win

Conjugation

Conjugation of wan
infinitive I wan
infinitive II tu wanen
past participle wonen
imperative singular wan
imperative plural wan'em
  present past
1st-person singular ik wan ik woon
2nd-person singular dü wanst dü woonst
3rd-person singular hi/hat/at want hi/hat/at woon
1st-person dual wat wan wat woon
2nd-person dual jat wan jat woon
1st-person plural wi wan wi woon
2nd-person plural jam wan jam woon
3rd-person plural jo wan jo woon
  perfect pluperfect
1st-person singular ik haa wonen ik hed wonen
2nd-person singular dü heest wonen dü hedst wonen
3rd-person singular hi/hat/at hee wonen hi/hat/at hed wonen
1st-person dual wat haa wonen wat hed wonen
2nd-person dual jat haa wonen jat hed wonen
1st-person plural wi haa wonen wi hed wonen
2nd-person plural jam haa wonen jam hed wonen
3rd-person plural jo haa wonen jo hed wonen
  future (skel) future (wel)
1st-person singular ik skal wan ik wal wan
2nd-person singular dü skääl wan dü wääl wan
3rd-person singular hi/hat/at skal wan hi/hat/at wal wan
1st-person dual wat skel wan wat wel wan
2nd-person dual jat skel wan jat wel wan
1st-person plural wi skel wan wi wel wan
2nd-person plural jam skel wan jam wel wan
3rd-person plural jo skel wan jo wel wan


Okinawan

Romanization

Template:ryu-romaji

  1. Template:ryu-romanization of

Old English

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Alternative forms

Pronunciation

Verb

wan

  1. third-person singular of winnan
    Grendel wan hwile wið Hroþgar. ― Grendel long fought against Hrothgar. (Beowulf ll. 151-2)

Pipil

Pronunciation

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Relational

-wan

  1. with, in relation to
    Shiwi nuwan wan niweli nimetzilwitia ne nukal yankwik
    Come with me and I can show you my new house

Declension

Declension of -wan
Person Number
singular plural
first nuwan tuwan
second muwan anmuwan
third iwan inwan

Conjunction

wan

  1. and, but
    Shinechmaka yey pula wan chikwasen tumat
    Give me three plantains and six tomatoes
    Nikilwij ma timuitakan yalua wan inte walajsik
    I told her/him to meet yesterday but she/he didn't come

Scots

Numeral

wan

  1. (West Central Scots) one.

Sranan Tongo

Etymology 1

From English one.

Number

wan

  1. one

Etymology 2

Verb

wan

  1. Alternative form of wani

Tok Pisin

Etymology

From English one.

Noun

wan

  1. The number one.
This entry has fewer than three known examples of actual usage, the minimum considered necessary for clear attestation, and may not be reliable. This language is subject to a special exemption for languages with limited documentation. If you speak it, please consider editing this entry or adding citations. See also Help and the Community Portal.

Numeral

wan

  1. One. Used with units of measurement and in times: wan aua, wan klok. See also wanpela.

Derived terms

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