Word.ws English Dictionary

ident

/ˈaɪdənt/

ident adjective: diligent; persistent.

Adjective

ident (comparative more ident, superlative most ident)

  1. (Northern England, Scotland, Now chiefly dialectal) Diligent; persistent.

Noun

IPA/ˈaɪdɛnt/

ident (plural idents)

  1. An identification.
    • Well, that's the priority. Get the ident.2022, Liam McIlvanney, The Heretic, page 37
  2. A brief audio or audiovisual sequence serving to identify the broadcaster.
    • In 1999 Chaudoir and fellow BBC designer Tim Platt were given the task of rebranding the existing BBC2 idents.2002, Jane Austin, Graphic Originals
  3. (Internet) A protocol serving to identify the user of a particular TCP connection, used especially on IRC networks.
    • […] the intruder installed an IRC bot and French ident daemon to reply to IRC servers with a name other than root.2004, Eoghan Casey, Digital Evidence and Computer Crime
  4. An identifier.

Verb

IPA/ˈaɪdɛnt/

ident (third-person singular simple present idents, present participle identing, simple past and past participle idented)

  1. (intransitive) To activate the aircraft transponder identification feature.

ident meaning in Arabic

ident in Arabic

broadcasting identifying sequence
فَاصِل fāṣil

Forms of ident

Adjective
comparativemore ident
superlativemost ident
alternative formeident
Noun
pluralidents
Verb
third-person singular presentidents
present participleidenting
past participleidented
pastidented

Origin of ident

From a later form of ithand, itself an alteration (due to assimilation to suffix -and) of Middle English ithen, from Old Norse iðinn (“assiduous, diligent”), from iðja, iðna (“to do, perform”), from ið (“a restless motion”), equivalent to ithe + -and and/or ithe + -en. Cognate with Icelandic iðinn (“diligent”), Norwegian idig (“busy”), Danish id (“pursuit, calling, business”). More at ithand.

A shortened form of identification.

A shortened form of identify.

Words formed from ident

Questions about ident

What does ident mean?
Ident means diligent; persistent.
What is ident in Arabic?
Ident in Arabic is فَاصِل (fāṣil). See Ident meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is ident?
Ident can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce ident?
Ident is pronounced /ˈaɪdənt/.

Words near ident in the dictionary

  1. idempotented
  2. idempotently
  3. idempotentness
  4. idempotents
  5. Iden
  6. ident
  7. identarian
  8. idented
  9. identic
  10. identical
  11. identical by descent

Source and license

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