Word.ws English Dictionary

chown

chown verb: to change the owner of (a file or directory).

Verb

chown (third-person singular simple present chowns, present participle chowning, simple past and past participle chowned)

  1. (Unix, transitive) To change the owner of (a file or directory).
    • When chowning a file, simply use: chown flags username:groupname2006, Eric Rosebrock, Eric Filson, Setting up LAMP (page 49)

Forms of chown

third-person singular presentchowns
present participlechowning
past participlechowned
pastchowned

Origin of chown

From the name of the program for this purpose, short for "change owner".

Questions about chown

What does chown mean?
Chown means to change the owner of (a file or directory).
What part of speech is chown?
Chown is a verb.
What is the past tense of chown?
The past tense of chown is chowned.

Words near chown in the dictionary

  1. chowline
  2. chowlines
  3. chowmein
  4. chowmeineries
  5. chowmeinery
  6. chown
  7. chowned
  8. chownee
  9. chownees
  10. chowning
  11. Chownings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chown (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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Cite this entry: “chown.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chown. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.