Word.ws English Dictionary

bavin

/ˈbæ.vɪn/

bavin noun: a bundle of wood or twigs, which may be used in broom-making.

Noun

bavin (countable and uncountable, plural bavins)

  1. (Southern-England, archaic, collective, countable) A bundle of wood or twigs, which may be used in broom-making.
    • […]that hot love is soon cold: that the bavin, though it burn bright, is but a blaze: that scalding water, it if stand awhile, turneth almost to ice[…]1578, John Lyly, Euphues
    1. (Southern-England, archaic, collective, countable) A faggot bound with only one band.
  2. (UK, dialectal, uncountable) Impure limestone.
    • The concretions […] are called 'bavin,' the shale associated with them being termed 'rotch.'1839, Roderick Murchison, The Silurian System, i. xxxvi. 484

Verb

bavin (third-person singular simple present bavins, present participle bavining, simple past and past participle bavined)

  1. (Southern-England, archaic) To bundle and bind wood into bavins.

Adjective

bavin (not comparable)

  1. Made of firewood or kindling.
    • The skipping King, he ambled up and down, / With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits, / Soon kindled and soon burnt, carded his state, / Mingled his royalty with capering fools,a. 1597, William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, act 3, scene 2, lines 60–63

Forms of bavin

Noun
pluralbavins
Verb
third-person singular presentbavins
present participlebavining
past participlebavined
pastbavined

Origin of bavin

Perhaps Old French baffe (“a faggot”).

Questions about bavin

What does bavin mean?
Bavin means a bundle of wood or twigs, which may be used in broom-making.
What part of speech is bavin?
Bavin can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce bavin?
Bavin is pronounced /ˈbæ.vɪn/.
What is the plural of bavin?
The plural of bavin is bavins.

Words near bavin in the dictionary

  1. bavette
  2. bavettes
  3. Baveystock
  4. bavian
  5. bavians
  6. bavin
  7. bavined
  8. Bavington
  9. bavining
  10. bavins
  11. bavistin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bavin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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