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wan

adj
/wɒn/UK/wɑn/US/wæn/

Etymology

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”).

  1. inherited from *wannaz✻ — “dark, swart”
  2. inherited from wann — “dark, dusky”
  3. inherited from wan

Definitions

  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.

  3. Bland, uninterested.

    • A wan expression
  4. ›+ 6 more definitions

    1. The quality of being wan

      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 ; [...]

    2. Pronunciation spelling of one, representing Ireland and Glasgow English.

    3. 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.

    4. simple past of win.

    5. Acronym of wide area network.

      • Message latency is much more of an issue on a WAN than on a LAN.

    6. A surname.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for wan. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA