wan

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”),^[1] from Proto-Germanic *wannaz (“dark, swart”), of uncertain origin. Cognate with Old Frisian wann, wonn (“dark”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /wɒn/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /wɑn/
• (obsolete) IPA^(key): /wæn/^[2]
• Rhymes: -ɒn
• Homophone: one

wan (comparative wanner, superlative wannest)

1. Pale, sickly-looking.

   Synonyms: ashen, pasty; see also 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.

   • 1838 October, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Beleaguered City”, in Voices of the Night, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1839, →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 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →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.

   Synonyms: dull, dun, leaden, uncolorful

   Antonyms: colorful, colorific, coloury; see also Thesaurus:multicolored

   • 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.

   Synonyms: insipid, lackluster; see also Thesaurus:boring

   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.”

• green and wan
• wanly
• wanness
• wanthriven

wan (uncountable)

1. The quality of being wan; wanness.

   Synonyms: achromatism, decolouration, paleness, pallidity, pallor

   • 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 ; [...]

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.

wan (plural wans)

1. Pronunciation spelling of one, representing Ireland English.
2. (Ireland) A girl or woman.

   Synonyms: lass, maid; see also Thesaurus:girl, Thesaurus: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.

• cubewano

An inflected form.

wan

1. (obsolete) simple past of win.

• NWA, awn, naw

Ainu cardinal numbers

<  9	10	11  >
Cardinal : wan     Ordinal : wan ikinne

• IPA^(key): [ɰᵝan]

wan (Kana spelling ワン)

1. ten

From English one.

• IPA^(key): /wan/

wan (Bengali script ৱান)

1. one

• sa
• rongsa
• eek

• van Breugel, Seino. 2015. Atong-English dictionary, second edition. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/487044/Atong_English_Dictionary. Stated in Appendix 2.

Bislama cardinal numbers

<  0	1	2  >
Cardinal : wan

From English one.

wan

1. one

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑn

Ultimately from Latin vannus.

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

1. winnowing basket

wan

1. inflection of wannen:
   1. first-person singular present indicative
   2. (in case of inversion) second-person singular present indicative
   3. imperative

Borrowed from English one.

wan

1. one

wan

1. Romanization of 𐍅𐌰𐌽

wan (Wiesemann spelling)

1. Alternative spelling of wann

• uan

From tuan.

• (Standard Indonesian) IPA^(key): /ˈwan/ [ˈwan]
• Rhymes: -an
• Syllabification: wan

wan

1. (dialectal) sir

• “wan” in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, Jakarta: Agency for Language Development and Cultivation – Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, 2016.

Jamaican Creole numbers ^(edit)

		10
		1	2  →	10  →
Cardinal: wan     Ordinal: fos

Derived from English one.

• IPA^(key): /wãn/

wan

1. one
   • 2012, Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment, Edinburgh: DJB, published 2012, →ISBN, 2:5:

     Kaaz a onggl wan Gad de bout, an Jiizas Krais a di migl man, di onggl wan we kyan bring Gad an piipl tugeda.

     For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,

• IPA^(key): /wã/

wan

1. a, an (indefinite article)
   • 2012, Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment, Edinburgh: DJB, published 2012, →ISBN, 4:9:

     So nou, di Samaritan uman se tu Jiizas se, “Yu a wan Juu an mi a wan Samaritan uman. […]

     he Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? […]

• wahn

• wan at majstro.com

wan

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

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

• IPA^(key): /wan˧˩/

wan

1. fire
2. lamp; light; lantern

Borrowed from Mandarin 碗 (wǎn, “bowl”).

• IPA^(key): /wan˧˧/

wan

1. bowl

wan

1. Classifier for the quantity of a bowl: bowlful

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

wan

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

• Transcriptions of Mandarin into the Latin script often do not distinguish between the critical tonal differences employed in the Mandarin language, using words such as this one without indication of tone.

wan

1. to fear

• A Maranao Dictionary, by Howard P. McKaughan and Batua A. Macaraya

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

wan

1. wan (pallid, sickly)
2. wan (dim, faint)

• wane, wanne, won, wonne, wone

• English: wan
• Scots: wan

• “wan, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

wan (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of wane (“deprivation”)

wan

1. Alternative form of wane

wan (uncountable)

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

wan

1. Alternative form of whan

wan (plural wanes)

1. (Northern, Early Middle English) Alternative form of wone (“dwelling”)

wan (uncountable)

1. Alternative form of wane (“woeful state”)

wan (plural wanes)

1. Alternative form of wone (“choice”)

wan (plural wanes)

1. Alternative form of wayn (“wagon”)

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

wan

1. Alternative form of whenne

wan

1. Alternative form of whenne

wan

1. Alternative form of whanne

wan

1. Alternative form of whanne

wan

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

From English want.

wan

1. want, want to

wan (plural boom)

1. child

• R. Blench, Beboid Comparative

• wine, wune (Mooring)
• wen (Sylt)

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

wan

1. (Föhr-Amrum) to win

• wann

• IPA^(key): /wɔn/

wan

1. third-person singular of winnan

   Grendel wan hwile wið Hroþgar. ― Grendel long fought against Hrothgar. (Beowulf ll. 151-2)

Unknown. (This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

• IPA^(key): /wan/
• Rhymes: -wan

wan Clear or plain; certain or fixed. Herd.

• *hwan
• *on

• "wan" in P.J. Zoetmulder with the collaboration of S.O. Robson, Old Javanese-English Dictionary. 's-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1982.

• (standard) IPA^(key): /waŋ/

-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

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

• IPA^(key): /wan/, /wɑn/

wan

1. (West Central Scots, Orkney) one

From English one.

wan

1. one

wan

1. Placed before a singular noun, indicating a general case of a person or thing: a, an
   • c. 1970, Michaël Slory, “Dungru worku broko a faja gi mi: wan fresko mamanten”, in Fri-kontren-sma‎^[2], page 9:

     Mi o gwe go suku wan tra sortu libi now.

     I'll go away now, to look for a different kind of life.

wan

1. Contraction of wani.

Tok Pisin numbers ^(edit)

		10
		1	2  →	10  →
Cardinal: wan

From English one.

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.

wan

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

• IPA^(key): [wɛ̃]

From Mandarin 玩 (wán).

wan

1. to play

From Mandarin 碗 (wǎn).

wan

1. bowl

   ngu wan da-pe-lio.

   I broke a bowl.

   (Quoted in Sandman, p. 93)

• Erika Sandman (2016) A Grammar of Wutun‎^[3], University of Helsinki (PhD), →ISBN