haven

/ˈheɪvən/

haven noun: a harbour or anchorage protected from the sea. Also the plural simple present of have.

Noun

haven (plural havens)

(dated, literal) A harbour or anchorage protected from the sea.
- And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill;1842, Alfred Tennyson, “"Break, break, break,"”, in Poems. […], volume II, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 229
A safe place.
- Since its conception, the European Union has been a haven for those seeking refuge from war, persecution and poverty in other parts of the world.2011 December 21, Helen Pidd, “Europeans migrate south as continent drifts deeper into crisis”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 08 Mar 2021
Synonyms:

refuge, sanctuary, zoar
A peaceful or tranquil place.
A certain type of function on sets of vertices in an undirected graph, able to be used by an evader to win a pursuit-evasion game on the graph.

Verb

haven (third-person singular simple present havens, present participle havening, simple past and past participle havened)

To put into, or provide with a haven.

Proper noun capitalized: Haven

Haven

A surname.
A unisex given name of modern usage.
A city in Reno County, Kansas.
A township in Sherburne County, Minnesota, named after John Ormsbee Haven.
A hamlet in Sullivan County, New York.
A ghost town in Grant County, Washington.
An unincorporated community in the town of Mosel, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.
A town in the Rural City of Horsham, Victoria, Australia.

Also used as

haven is also the plural simple present of have.

haven meaning in Punjabi and Arabic

haven in Arabic

harbour: مِينَاء mīnāʔ, مَرْفَأ marfaʔ
refuge: مَلَاذ malāḏ, مَلْجَأ maljaʔ

Examples of haven in a sentence

Even the tabloid Bild, hardly known as a haven of art-house snobbery, published a hatchet job.
Ironically named “Ashvegas”, this Canterbury town is sometimes described as a haven for retired farmers.
These are not the relaxing, spalike havens like the ones that serve wealthier clientele.

All 37 example sentences with haven

Synonyms of haven

Forms of haven

Noun
plural	havens
Verb
third-person singular present	havens
present participle	havening
past participle	havened
past	havened

Plural of haven: havens

Origin of haven

From Middle English haven, havene, from Old English hæfen (“haven; harbour; port”), either from Proto-West Germanic *habanu or Old Norse hǫfn, from Proto-Germanic *habnō, *habanō (compare Dutch haven, German Hafen, Norwegian/Danish havn, Swedish hamn, French havre), from Proto-Germanic *habą (“sea”) (compare Old English hæf, Middle Low German haf, Old Norse haf (“sea”), German Haff (“bay or lagoon behind a spit”), perhaps, in the sense of "heaving sea", etymologically identical with Old Norse haf (“heaving, lifting, uplift, elevation”), derived from Proto-Germanic *habjaną (“to lift, heave”)), or from Proto-Indo-European *kh₂pnós (compare Old Irish cúan (“harbor, recess, haven”)). Doublet of abra.

From Middle English haven; equivalent to have + -en (plural simple present ending).

Words formed from haven

Phrases with haven

Words that rhyme with haven

Questions about haven

What does haven mean?: Haven means a harbour or anchorage protected from the sea.
What is haven in Punjabi?: Haven in Punjabi is ਪਨਾਹਗਾਹ (panāhgāh). See Haven meaning in Punjabi.
What part of speech is haven?: Haven can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce haven?: Haven is pronounced /ˈheɪvən/.
What is the plural of haven?: The plural of haven is havens.

Words near haven in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: haven (page history and authors); Haven (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-haven.ogg.

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