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WAN

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wan¹

  • /wɒn/ UK
  • /wɑn/ US
  • /wæn/ obsolete

Sounds like one (for speakers who pronounce that word as /wɒn/), won (etymologies 2 and 3) · Rhymes with -ɒn

Where it comes from

From Middle English wan, wanne (“grey, leaden; pale grey, ashen; blue-black (like a bruise); dim, faint; dark, gloomy”), from Old English wann (“dark, dusky”), from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swart”), of uncertain origin. Cognate with Old Frisian wann, wonn (“dark”). The meaning and sense has been attributed to influence from Proto-Brythonic, Proto-Celtic *wasnos (cf. Welsh gwan. Irish fann).

adjective wanner · wannest

  1. Pale, sickly-looking. 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.
  2. Dim, faint. ’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

noun

  1. uncountable The quality of being wan; wanness. 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 ; [...]

wan²

Where it comes from

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 wans

  1. pronunciation spelling Pronunciation spelling of one, representing Ireland and Glasgow English.one
  2. Ireland A girl or woman. 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.

wan³

Where it comes from

An inflected form.

verb

  1. obsolete, past simple past of win.win

WAN⁴

  • /wæn/

Rhymes with -æn

noun WANs

  1. abbreviation, acronym Acronym of wide area network.wide area network Message latency is much more of an issue on a WAN than on a LAN.

Wan⁵

proper noun Wans

  1. A surname.

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