wern

English

Etymology 1

See warn.

Verb

wern (third-person singular simple present werns, present participle werning, simple past and past participle werned)

1. (obsolete, transitive) To refuse.

   He is too great a niggard that will wern / A man to light a candle at his lantern. — Chaucer.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “wern”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Etymology 2

From Middle English weren, equivalent to were +‎ -en.

Verb

wern

1. (obsolete) plural simple past of be
   • c. 1450 The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers

     And thanne he seide to other folkes that thei shulde seye somme goode thinges for to recomforte the lordes and the people, which werne in grete trouble as for the deth of the moste noble kinge that ever was.

   • 1469, Margaret Paston, The Paston Letters:

     And she rehearsed what she had said, and said if tho words made it not sure she said boldly that she would make it surer ere than she went thence; for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound, whatsoever the words wern.

   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto II:

     Her name was Agape whose children werne

     All three as one, the first hight Priamond,

     The second Dyamond, the youngest Triamond.

   • 1910, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, Glasgerion in The Oxford Book of English Verse

     Through the falseness of that lither lad

     These three lives wern all gone.

Anagrams

• Wren, wren

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Middle English

Verb

wern

1. Alternative form of weren