Word.ws English Dictionary

gen

/d͡ʒɛn/

gen noun: information. Also the alternative letter-case form of Gen.

Noun (1)

gen (uncountable)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, informal) Information.
    • Nose around any modest-sized station and the odds are you'll find that the chargeman's office doubles as a bashers' club, a place where shivering spotters can get warm and catch up on the gen.2015, Nicholas Whittaker, Platform Souls: The Trainspotter as 20th-Century Hero
  2. Information about the location of a bird.
    • I had some recent gen that they had been seen quite recently at Kunoth Well, a little dot on the map on the edge of the Tanami Desert.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 172
  3. (slang) Fan fiction that does not specifically focus on romance or sex.
    Synonyms:
    genfic

Adjective

gen (not comparable)

  1. general

Verb (1)

gen (third-person singular simple present gens, present participle genning, simple past and past participle genned)

  1. To generate using an automated process, especially a computer program.
    • genned with a LLM
    • Defining the devices so that they will be genned during the sysgen and installation is the other half.1991, Bruce H. Hunter, Karen Bradford Hunter, UNIX Systems: Advanced Administration and Management Handbook

Noun (2)

gen (plural gens)

  1. (slang) A generator (device that converts mechanical to electrical energy).
    Synonyms:
    genny

Verb (2)

gen (third-person singular simple present gens, present participle genning, simple past and past participle genned)

  1. To genetically engineer.
    • Samples could be taken from the original, and plans could be made, but genning could not be initiated until death had occurred.2008, Bart Dahmer, Primal Screams, →ISBN, page 36
    • Her nurturer ears, genned to be hyper-sensitive, had to be hurting from the noise.2011, Karen Sandler, Tankborn, →ISBN, page 28

Noun (3)

gen (plural gens)

  1. (UK, obsolete, slang) A shilling.
    • The betting also began to shift. "Sixpence Ned wins!" cried three or four; "Sixpence he loses!" answered another; "Done!" and up went the halfpence. "Half-a-crown Joe loses!"—"Here you are," answered Joe, but he lost again. "I'll try you a 'gen'" (shilling) said a coster; "And a 'rouf yenap'"...1851, Henry Mayhew, “Gambling of Costermongers”, in London Labour and the London Poor, volume 1, page 17
    • "Give me two gen, then, and take the whole bloody tol. I've walked me teef orf afore rouf this mornin', and wot 'ave I got? Two bloody yenneps! I ask yer."1978, Rose Ayers, The Street Sparrows

Noun (4)

gen (plural gens)

  1. (informal) A generation (group of people born in a specific range of years).
    • "Mladenovic playing in what the young gen is calling a crop top, but what my gen is calling a bra," Bouchard tweeted. "Sign of the times that Wimbledon has no issue with that. Still can remember the year some had troubles because of 'too short' skirts lol."2022 June 28, “Wimbledon tennis: Fans react to Kristina Mladenovic's eye-catching outfit”, in The New Zealand Herald, archived from the original on 26 Oct 2022
    • It’s anyone’s guess whether such attitudes will persist into adulthood, but if Gen Z (and the gens to come) do prove more alco-skeptic than their forbears then the above twelve steps are deftly primed to cash in.2022 July 4, Ben Schott, “Is There Anything That Gen Z Won’t Drink?”, in The Washington Post
  2. (in-compounds, informal) A specific version of something in a chronological sequence.
    • For my fellow first-gens, get ready to hide a smirk, because your life story is likely hidden somewhere in this chapter. For the uninitiated—that is, the person who's never had a thing to do with the Arab way of doing things (namely dating)—I advise you to buckle up.2004, Sally Bishai, “Courtship, Marriage and the Ubiquitous ‘Dating Thing’”, in Mid-East Meets West: On Being and Becoming a Modern Arab American, Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse, →ISBN, page 57
    • […] I witness firsthand the difficult "downstream" outcomes (Grusky 2014) of social class stratification in a university setting where approximately 3,400 undergraduates (13% of the undergraduate population) are first in their families to attend and/or graduate from college (first-gens). Most of...2016, Dwight Lang, “Witnessing Social Class in the Academy”, in Allison L. Hurst, Sandi Kawecka Nenga, editors, Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work, Lanham, Md....

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Gen

Gen

  1. A Niger-Congo language of Togo.

Noun (5) capitalized: Gen

Gen (plural Gens)

  1. A member of the Gen Movement, a youth expression of the international Focolare Movement.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Gen

Gen

  1. A female given name, a short form of Genevieve.
    • Hal. Oh, don't fuss, Gen. I'll do my part all right. Mamma's 'structed me, you know.
      Genevieve. Instructed, Hal.1894, Harper's Young People, page 208
    • “Gen? Listen, I'm so sorry I did that, Gen. You gotta believe me. I'm not like this and you know it.” “Listen...Kyle, I...I don't think I want to see you anymore.” Genevieve's voice cracked. “Gen!”2017, Emma G Prince, The Silent Life of Genevieve, →ISBN

Noun (6) capitalized: Gen

Gen (plural Gens)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of Gen. (“General”).
    • Particularly notable was the presence not just of Nato’s military chief, the American Gen Christopher Cavoli, but also Adm Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s most senior military officer, who is now acknowledged in Washington and Kyiv as an increasingly important actor in helping Ukraine overcome the...2023 August 26, Dan Sabbagh, “‘That’s our guy’: how UK military chief became key Nato liaison in Ukraine”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Noun (7) capitalized: GEN

GEN (plural GENs)

  1. (US, abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of group exemption number.

Also used as

gen is also the alternative letter-case form of Gen.

gen is also the clipping of genuinely.

Examples of gen in a sentence

  • The older, genned files are difficult to keep up-to-date and are unsupported for some newer NICs.1993, Debra R. Niedermiller-Chaffins, Drew Heywood, Inside Novell NetWare, →ISBN, page 100:
  • As the capacities of the large servers are exceeded, a new server is genned into the RAC cluster.2010, Donald K. Burleson, Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference, →ISBN, page 1109:
  • The Turing factories on Isis's small moon had fallen short of productivity goals, though another two factory units had been genned.2012, Robert Charles Wilson, Bios, →ISBN:
  • "I'll try you a 'gen'" (shilling) said a coster; "And a 'rouf yenap'" (fourpence), added the other.1851, Henry Mayhew, “Gambling of Costermongers”, in London Labour and the London Poor, volume 1, page 17:

All 40 example sentences with gen

Synonyms of gen

Forms of gen

Noun
pluralgens
pluralGens
pluralGENs
Verb
third-person singular presentgens
present participlegenning
past participlegenned
pastgenned

Origin of gen

Clipping of general.

Shortened from generate and generator.

Shortened from genetic engineering

Words formed from gen

Phrases with gen

14 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with gen

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about gen

What does gen mean?
Gen means information.
How do you use gen in a sentence?
The older, genned files are difficult to keep up-to-date and are unsupported for some newer NICs.
What part of speech is gen?
Gen can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce gen?
Gen is pronounced /d͡ʒɛn/.
What is the plural of gen?
The plural of gen is gens.

Words near gen in the dictionary

  1. gemykibivirus
  2. gemykibiviruses
  3. Gemünden am Main
  4. gemütlich
  5. gemütlichkeit
  6. gen
  7. gen AI
  8. gen AIs
  9. Gen Alpha
  10. Gen Alphas
  11. Gen Beta

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gen (page history and authors); Gen (page history and authors); GEN (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: En-au-gen.ogg.

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