Word.ws English Dictionary

forban

forban verb: to exile; banish.

Verb

forban (third-person singular simple present forbans, present participle forbanning, simple past and past participle forbanned)

  1. (archaic, obsolete, poetic, rare, transitive) To exile; banish.
    • That lower down it constitutes correspondential phytostatics, or pressure of vegetable life, grasping matter close with prolonged human fingers in the trees, and forbanning materialism from the very stones.1876, James John Garth Wilkinson, On Human Science: Good and Evil, and on Divine Revelation
    • Lost from those archangelic thrones that star,
      Fadeless and fixed, heaven's light of azure bliss;
      Forbanned of all His splendor and depressed
      Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower
      Than the last star's decline1918, Clark Ashton Smith, "Satan Unrepentant"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Satan_Unrepentant (also on page 295 of the 2014 collection The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies)

Forms of forban

third-person singular presentforbans
present participleforbanning
past participleforbanned
pastforbanned

Origin of forban

From Middle English forbannen, partly from Middle English for- + bannen, equivalent to for- + ban; and partly from Old French forbenir (“to banish”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian ferbonne (“to banish”), West Frisian ferbanne (“to banish”), Dutch verbannen (“to banish”), German Low German verbannen (“to banish”), German verbannen (“to banish”), Swedish förbanna (“to curse, damn”).

Words that rhyme with forban

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about forban

What does forban mean?
Forban means to exile; banish.
What part of speech is forban?
Forban is a verb.
What is the past tense of forban?
The past tense of forban is forbanned.

Words near forban in the dictionary

  1. forays
  2. forb
  3. forbaceous
  4. forbad
  5. forbade
  6. forban
  7. forbanish
  8. forbanished
  9. forbanishes
  10. forbanishing
  11. forbanned

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forban (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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