Word.ws English Dictionary

shengnan

shengnan noun: a man who has for an extended amount of time been unable to find a romantic, interpersonal or physically intimate relationship.

Noun

shengnan (uncountable)

  1. (China) A man who has for an extended amount of time been unable to find a romantic, interpersonal or physically intimate relationship.
    • The marriage candidates on offer in the parks, she discovered, were often a mismatch of shengnu ("leftover women") and shengnan ("leftover men"), two groups from opposite ends of the social scale.2013 March 9, Brook Larmer, “The Price of Marriage in China”, in New York Times
    • These men have their own unflattering nickname — shengnan, or "leftover men."2015 September 2, Venus Wong, “Inside China's Open-Air Marriage Market For "Leftover Women"”, in Refinery29, retrieved 29 Oct 2019

Origin of shengnan

From Mandarin 剩男 (shèngnán).

Questions about shengnan

What does shengnan mean?
Shengnan means a man who has for an extended amount of time been unable to find a romantic, interpersonal or physically intimate relationship.
What part of speech is shengnan?
Shengnan is a noun.

Words near shengnan in the dictionary

  1. sheng
  2. sheng nu
  3. sheng nus
  4. sheng nü
  5. Shenga Bjemi
  6. shengnan
  7. shengnu
  8. shengnü
  9. shengs
  10. Shengsi
  11. shengyuan

Source and license

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