Word.ws English Dictionary

forne

forne adjective: former.

Adjective

forne (comparative more forne, superlative most forne)

  1. (obsolete) Former.
    • The Camel's hous; whiche it is saied that a certain king / In forne yeares, when he had on a Dromedarie Camele escaped the handes of his enemies, builded there.1564, Nicholas Udall, Apophthegmatum opus (originally by Erasmus)

Forms of forne

comparativemore forne
superlativemost forne

Origin of forne

From Middle English, variation of Middle English ferne (“old, long ago, distant, past”), from Old English fyrn (“former, ancient”), from Proto-Germanic *furnaz, *fernaz, *firnijaz (“old, former”), from Proto-Indo-European *per- (“next, of, out, through”). More at fern.

Questions about forne

What does forne mean?
Forne means former.
What part of speech is forne?
Forne is an adjective.

Words near forne in the dictionary

  1. fornace
  2. fornacite
  3. Fornax
  4. forncast
  5. Forncett
  6. forne
  7. fornenst
  8. fornent
  9. Forner
  10. Forners
  11. Fornes

Source and license

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