Word.ws English Dictionary

mavourneen

UK/məˈvʊəniːn/US/məˈvʊɹniːn/

mavourneen noun: darling, sweetheart.

Noun

mavourneen (plural mavourneens)

  1. (Ireland) darling, sweetheart
    • "Ay, Paddy, mavourneen; I'll be bail they didn't skit and laugh the way some people would be doin'." "Laugh! not thimsilves, indeed."1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 515
    • 1850 (approx.), Anonymous, Finnegan's Wake
      Biddy O'Brien began to cry
      "Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
      "Arrah, Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?"
      "Ah, shut your gob," said Paddy McGee!

Forms of mavourneen

pluralmavourneens

Origin of mavourneen

Hiberno-English, from Irish mo mhuirnín (“my darling”) (diminutive of muirn (“affection”)).

Phrases with mavourneen

Questions about mavourneen

What does mavourneen mean?
Mavourneen means darling, sweetheart.
What part of speech is mavourneen?
Mavourneen is a noun.
How do you pronounce mavourneen?
Mavourneen is pronounced /məˈvʊəniːn/ (UK).
What is the plural of mavourneen?
The plural of mavourneen is mavourneens.

Words near mavourneen in the dictionary

  1. Mavor
  2. mavorixafor
  3. Mavors
  4. Mavortial
  5. Mavortian
  6. mavourneen
  7. mavourneens
  8. mavournin
  9. mavournins
  10. Mavridis
  11. mavrilimumab

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mavourneen (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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