Word.ws English Dictionary

gan

/ɡæn/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ɡan/

gan verb: to go. Also the simple past of gin.

Verb

gan (third-person singular simple present gans, present participle gawn or gannin, simple past went, past participle gane)

  1. (North, Northumbria, Yorkshire) To go.
    • The one problem I had here was my broad Geordie accent which the teachers tried their hardest to make me lose. I couldn't understand their problem with it because I could understand myself. Whenever I told them, "Am gannin yem", they would say, "No, Christopher. It's not "am gannin yem", it's "I am...2011, Chris Dockerty, Ramblings of a Geordie

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Gan

Gan

  1. One of the major varieties of Chinese, spoken in Jiangxi province.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Gan

Gan

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of Ngen (“dialect of the Beng language”).

Proper noun (3) capitalized: Gan

Gan (countable and uncountable, plural Gans)

  1. A surname.

Proper noun (4) capitalized: Gan

Gan

  1. An industrial island of Addu.
  2. An uninhabited island of Gaafu Dhaalu.
  3. A residential island of Laamu.

Noun (1) capitalized: GAN

GAN (countable and uncountable, plural GANs)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym, machine learning) Acronym of generative adversarial network.
    • The GAN we look at in the next exercise is a vanilla GAN with convolution.2020, Micheal Lanham, Practical AI on the Google Cloud Platform, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 248
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Great American Novel.
    • During that week of squall in March of that year Hem would talk till dawn about which son of a bitch who could spell cat was going to write the G.A.N.1973, Philip Roth, The Great American Novel, Random House, published 2010, →ISBN, page 38
  3. (abbreviation, acronym, uncountable) Acronym of giant axonal neuropathy.
  4. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of good article nomination.

Noun (2) capitalized: GaN

GaN (uncountable)

  1. gallium nitride.

Also used as

gan is also the simple past of gin.

Examples of gan in a sentence

  • If ye gannin oot the neet ye betta tell wor Jimmy.
  • Are ye gannin te cadge a lift of yoer fatha?
  • Let we gan and get some scran. Aw’m starvin man!

All 12 example sentences with gan

Forms of gan

Verb
third-person singular presentgans
present participlegawn
present participlegannin
pastwent
past participlegane
alternative formgang
Proper noun
pluralGans
Noun
pluralGANs

Past tense of gan: went

Origin of gan

Probably a variant of gang, from Middle English gangen, from Old English gangan (“to step; walk; go”).

From Mandarin 贛／赣 (Gàn, “Jiangxi; Gan (language)”).

Borrowed from Mandarin 甘 (Gān), Hokkien 顏／颜 (Gân), etc.

Phrases with gan

Words that rhyme with gan

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about gan

What does gan mean?
Gan means to go.
What part of speech is gan?
Gan can be a verb, a proper noun or a noun.
How do you pronounce gan?
Gan is pronounced /ɡæn/ (UK).
What is the past tense of gan?
The past tense of gan is went.

Words near gan in the dictionary

  1. gamucha
  2. gamut
  3. gamuts
  4. gamy
  5. gamyness
  6. gan
  7. ganache
  8. ganached
  9. ganaches
  10. ganaching
  11. Ganado

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gan (page history and authors); Gan (page history and authors); GAN (page history and authors); GaN (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-gan.wav.

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