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.
   • 1387–1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, “(please specify the story)”, in The Canterbury Tales, [Westminster: William Caxton, published 1478], →OCLC; republished in [William Thynne], editor, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newlye Printed, […], [London]: […] [Richard Grafton for] Iohn Reynes […], 1542, →OCLC:

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

     (please add an English translation of this quotation)

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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, “Book IV, Canto 2
     ALL THREE AS ONE, THE FIRST HIGHT PRIAMOND,
     THE SECOND DYAMOND, THE YOUNGEST TRIAMOND.”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     Her name was Agape whose children werne

   • 1910, “Glasgerion”, in Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor, The Oxford Book of English Verse:

     Through the falseness of that lither lad
     These three lives wern all gone.

Anagrams

• Wren, wren

Middle English

Verb

wern

1. Alternative form of weren