EnglishEdit

Etymology 1Edit

 
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).

PronunciationEdit

AdjectiveEdit

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.: [] John Owen, →OCLC, stanzas 1–2, 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.
    • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 46, in The History of Pendennis. [], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, [], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:
      Blanche smiled languidly out upon the young men, thinking whether she looked very wan and green under her rose-coloured hood, and whether it was the mirrors at Gaunt House, or the fatigue and fever of her own eyes, which made her fancy herself so pale.
    • 1892, Joaquin Miller, Columbus :
      BEHIND him lay the gray Azores, / Behind the Gates of Hercules; / Before him not the ghost of shores, / Before him only shoreless seas. // The good mate said: “Now must we pray, / For lo! the very stars are gone. / Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?” / “Why, say, ‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’”
      “My men grow mutinous day by day; / My men grow ghastly wan and weak.” / The stout mate thought of home; a spray / Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. // “What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, / If we sight naught but seas at dawn?” / “Why, you shall say at break of day, / ‘Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!’”
      They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow, / Until at last the blanched mate said: / “Why, now not even God would know / Should I and all my men fall dead. // These very winds forget their way, / For God from these dread seas is gone. / Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say”— / He said: “Sail on! sail on! and on!”
      They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate: / “This mad sea shows his teeth to-night. / He curls his lip, he lies in wait, / With lifted teeth, as if to bite! // Brave Admiral, say but one good word: / What shall we do when hope is gone?” / The words leapt like a leaping sword: / “Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”
      Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck, / And peered through darkness. Ah, that night / Of all dark nights! And then a speck— / A light! A light! A light! A light! // It grew, a starlit flag unfurled! / It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn. / He gained a world; he gave that world / Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”
    • 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.
    • 1976, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift, New York: Avon, →ISBN, page 24:
      Big fair wan lovely pale-freckled Kathleen with that buoyant bust gave kindly smiles but mostly she was silent.
    • 2020, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, →ISBN, page 45:
      Instead, you wiped off the red lipstick with wadded-up toilet paper and forced a smile, leaving the locker room with a pale, cotton candy-colored lipstick that made you look wan and parched instead.
  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 termsEdit
TranslationsEdit

NounEdit

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 2Edit

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.

NounEdit

wan (plural wans)

  1. Pronunciation 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 3Edit

An inflected form.

VerbEdit

wan

  1. (obsolete) simple past tense of win.

ReferencesEdit

  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

AnagramsEdit

AinuEdit

Ainu cardinal numbers
<  9 10 11  >
    Cardinal : wan
    Ordinal : wan ikinne

PronunciationEdit

NumeralEdit

wan (Kana spelling ワン)

  1. ten

Atong (India)Edit

EtymologyEdit

From English one.

PronunciationEdit

NumeralEdit

wan (Bengali script ৱান)

  1. one

SynonymsEdit

ReferencesEdit

BislamaEdit

Bislama cardinal numbers
 <  0 1 2  >
    Cardinal : wan

EtymologyEdit

From English one.

NumeralEdit

wan

  1. one

DutchEdit

PronunciationEdit

Etymology 1Edit

Ultimately from Latin vannus.

NounEdit

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

  1. winnowing basket

Etymology 2Edit

VerbEdit

wan

  1. first-person singular present indicative of wannen
  2. imperative of wannen

FanagaloEdit

EtymologyEdit

Borrowed from English one.

NumeralEdit

wan

  1. one

GothicEdit

RomanizationEdit

wan

  1. Romanization of 𐍅𐌰𐌽

JapaneseEdit

RomanizationEdit

wan

  1. Rōmaji transcription of わん
  2. Rōmaji transcription of ワン

JingphoEdit

Etymology 1Edit

Inherited from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *bʷar ~ *pʷar (burn; fire; kindle; roast) (STEDT).

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

wan

  1. fire
  2. lamp; light; lantern

Etymology 2Edit

Borrowed from Mandarin (wǎn, “bowl”).

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

wan

  1. bowl

ClassifierEdit

wan

  1. Classifier for the quantity of a bowl: bowlful

ReferencesEdit

  • Xu, Xijian (徐悉艰); Xiao, Jiacheng (肖家成); Yue, Xiangkun (岳相昆); Dai, Qingxia (戴庆厦) (1983-12), “wan”, in 景汉辞典 [Jingpho-Chinese Dictionary], Kunming: Yunnan Nationalities Publishing House, pages 868-869

MandarinEdit

RomanizationEdit

wan

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

Usage notesEdit

  • English transcriptions of Mandarin speech often fail to distinguish between the critical tonal differences employed in the Mandarin language, using words such as this one without the appropriate indication of tone.

MaranaoEdit

VerbEdit

wan

  1. to fear

ReferencesEdit

Middle EnglishEdit

Etymology 1Edit

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

AdjectiveEdit

wan

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

ReferencesEdit

Etymology 2Edit

NounEdit

wan (uncountable)

  1. Alternative form of wane (deprivation)

Etymology 3Edit

AdjectiveEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of wane

Etymology 4Edit

NounEdit

wan (uncountable)

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

Etymology 5Edit

PronounEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of whan

Etymology 6Edit

NounEdit

wan (plural wanes)

  1. (Northern, early) Alternative form of wone (dwelling)

Etymology 7Edit

NounEdit

wan (uncountable)

  1. Alternative form of wane (woeful state)

Etymology 8Edit

NounEdit

wan (plural wanes)

  1. Alternative form of wone (choice)

Etymology 9Edit

NounEdit

wan (plural wanes)

  1. Alternative form of wayn (wagon)

Etymology 10Edit

VerbEdit

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 11Edit

AdverbEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of whenne

ConjunctionEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of whenne

Etymology 12Edit

AdverbEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of whanne

ConjunctionEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of whanne

Etymology 13Edit

VerbEdit

wan

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

Nigerian PidginEdit

EtymologyEdit

From English want.

VerbEdit

wan

  1. want, want to

NooneEdit

NounEdit

wan (plural boom)

  1. child

ReferencesEdit

North FrisianEdit

EtymologyEdit

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

VerbEdit

wan

  1. (Föhr-Amrum Dialect) to win

ConjugationEdit


OkinawanEdit

RomanizationEdit

wan

  1. Rōmaji transcription of わん

Old EnglishEdit

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Alternative formsEdit

PronunciationEdit

VerbEdit

wan

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

PipilEdit

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

-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

DeclensionEdit

ConjunctionEdit

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

ScotsEdit

NumeralEdit

wan

  1. (West Central) one.

Sranan TongoEdit

Etymology 1Edit

From English one.

NumberEdit

wan

  1. one

Etymology 2Edit

VerbEdit

wan

  1. Alternative form of wani

Tok PisinEdit

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.

EtymologyEdit

From English one.

NounEdit

wan

  1. The number one.
    • 1989, Buk Baibel long Tok Pisin, Port Moresby: Bible Society of Papua New Guinea, Jenesis 1:5:
      Tulait em i kolim “De,” na tudak em i kolim “Nait.” Nait i go pinis na moning i kamap. Em i de namba wan.
      Naming the light, Day, and the dark, Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

NumeralEdit

wan

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

Derived termsEdit

WutunhuaEdit

PronunciationEdit

Etymology 1Edit

From Mandarin (wán).

VerbEdit

wan

  1. to play

Etymology 2Edit

From Mandarin (wǎn).

NounEdit

wan

  1. bowl
    ngu wan da-pe-lio.
    I broke a bowl.
    (Quoted in Sandman, p. 93)

ReferencesEdit

  • Erika Sandman (2016) A Grammar of Wutun[2], University of Helsinki (PhD), →ISBN