Word.ws English Dictionary

colleen

UK/kəˈliːn/US/kəˈlin/

colleen noun: a girl.

Noun

colleen (plural colleens)

  1. (Ireland) A girl.
  2. (Ireland) A young single woman.
    • Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen \ And she smiled as she passed me by.c. 1900, “Star of the County Down (traditional folk song)”
    • So here was Timothy McShanus deserting the baked meats, to say nothing of his convenient corner in the buffet, to go out and stare at a red shepherdess with picture books and maizypop to sell. And what kind of a colleen was it that he saw? […] Young as she was—and I supposed her to be about...1906 June–November, Max Pemberton, “The Diamond Ship. […]”, in Cassell’s Magazine, Illustrated, London; Paris; New York, N.Y.; Melbourne, Vic.: Cassell and Company, Limited, →OCLC, page 101, columns...

Proper noun capitalized: Colleen

Colleen

  1. A female given name from English or Irish.
    • Her name is spelled Coleen making her "Co" with a hard O and not Colleen by any stretch - I'm suspicious on her authority on the subject.2007, Laurie Lindeen, Petal Pusher, Atria Books, →ISBN, page 137

colleen meaning in Tamil and Bengali

colleen in Tamil

சிறுமி

colleen in Bengali

আইরিশ তরুণী, মেয়ে

Forms of colleen

pluralcolleens
alternative formcoleen

Plural of colleen: colleens

Origin of colleen

Borrowed from Irish cailín.

From the word colleen, from Irish cailín (“girl”), not used as a name in Ireland. Colleen can also be interpreted as a variant of Coleen, which was a product of marketing by the Hollywood film industry (to promote a new starlet in the 1920s).

Words that rhyme with colleen

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about colleen

What does colleen mean?
Colleen means a girl.
What is colleen in Tamil?
Colleen in Tamil is சிறுமி. See Colleen meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is colleen?
Colleen can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce colleen?
Colleen is pronounced /kəˈliːn/ (UK).
What is the plural of colleen?
The plural of colleen is colleens.

Words near colleen in the dictionary

  1. collects up
  2. colled
  3. colledg
  4. colledge
  5. colledges
  6. colleen
  7. colleens
  8. college
  9. College City
  10. College for Women
  11. College of Cardinals

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: colleen (page history and authors); Colleen (page history and authors); colleen (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); colleen (Bengali Wiktionary) (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: “colleen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/colleen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.