Word.ws English Dictionary

ean

ean verb: to bring forth young; to yean.

Verb

ean (third-person singular simple present eans, present participle eaning, simple past and past participle eaned)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To bring forth young; to yean.
    • That I was shipp'd at sea, I well remember,
      Even on my eaning time; but whether there
      Deliver'd, by the holy gods,
      I cannot rightly say.c. 1607–1608 (date written), William Shakespeare, [George Wilkins?], The Late, and Much Admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. […], London: […] [William White and Thomas Creede] for Henry...

Proper noun (1) capitalized: EAN

EAN

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of European Article Numbering: a barcode symbology whose main variant, EAN-13, encodes thirteen digits, differing from UPC-A in that three of the digits in the left half are reversed so as to encode an additional digit.
  2. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of enriched air nitrox.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Ean

Ean

  1. A male given name from Manx.
    • Survived by daughter Stevi Lischin (Robert Smith), sons Brian (Diana) and Jeffrey (Diane Savona), brother Eugene Adler, grandchildren Ean, Joe, Elyssa and Mahlon.2008 October 15, “[Paid Notice: Deaths] Lischin, Ruth”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC
    • Ms. Chimelis’s 14-year-old son, Ean, saw a severed limb as police investigators collected evidence.2022 October 8, Chelsia Rose Marcius, “As New York’s Fear of Crime Grows, a Neighborhood Lives With Its Reality”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC...

Forms of ean

third-person singular presenteans
present participleeaning
past participleeaned
pasteaned

Origin of ean

From Middle English enen, from Old English ēanian (“to yean, bring forth young, bring forth lambs”), from Proto-West Germanic *aunōn, from Proto-Germanic *aunōną (“to bring forth lambs”). An alternate etymology derives the Old English word from a corruption of Old English ēacnian (“to add, increase, be enlarged, be augmented, become pregnant, conceive, bring forth, produce”), from ēacen (“increased, augmented”), from ēaca (“an addition, increase, eeking”), from Proto-Germanic *aukô (“increase”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ewg- (“to increase”). More at eke.

From Manx Ean, an equivalent of John.

Questions about ean

What does ean mean?
Ean means to bring forth young; to yean.
What part of speech is ean?
Ean can be a verb or a proper noun.
What is the past tense of ean?
The past tense of ean is eaned.

Words near ean in the dictionary

  1. Eamon
  2. Eamonn
  3. Eamont
  4. Eamont Bridge
  5. eams
  6. ean
  7. EAN32
  8. EAN36
  9. eaned
  10. eaning
  11. eanling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ean (page history and authors); EAN (page history and authors); Ean (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: “ean.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ean. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.