wen
/wɛn/ noun, proper noun
Also a form of when
Forms wens
- noun A cyst on the skin; a tumor or wart.
- proper noun A common surname from Chinese of east Asian derivation.
Synonyms
Etymology
From Middle English wen, wenne, from Old English wenn, wænn (“wen”), from Proto-Germanic *wanjaz. Cognate with Dutch wen (“goiter”), Low German Ween (“wen”), dialectal German Wenne (“wen”), Danish van, væne.
Inherited from Old English wynn.
Eye dialect spelling of when.
Webster’s 1913
- noun An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.
- noun One of the runes adopted into the Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, alphabet. It had the value of modern English w, and was replaced from about a. d. 1280 at first by uu, later by w.
Etymology [AS. wenn; akin to D. wen, LG. wenne.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “wen”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details