silvern
UK/ˈsɪlvən//ˈsɪlvɚn/
silvern adjective: made of silver; resembling or characteristic of silver; silvery.
Adjective
silvern (not comparable)
- Made of silver; resembling or characteristic of silver; silvery.
- But, leaving novelists alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern, silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie.1868 August 29, “Sleeping Dogs”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 26, number 670, page 287
- I know a pool, where shadows fall
From fir-trees, melancholy tall,
That dream and quiver round the rim,
And in the molten centre swim,
Where taper tops do all unite
Bemirrored in its silvern light.1885, Robert Bird, Law Lyrics, page 31
Origin of silvern
From Middle English sylveren, selverne, from Old English seolfren, from Proto-Germanic *silubrīnaz (“made of silver”); equivalent to silver + -(e)n. Cognate with Dutch zilveren (“silvern”), German silbern (“silvern”).
Questions about silvern
- What does silvern mean?
- Silvern means made of silver; resembling or characteristic of silver; silvery.
- What part of speech is silvern?
- Silvern is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce silvern?
- Silvern is pronounced /ˈsɪlvɚn/ (US).
Words near silvern in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: silvern (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Jtle515-silvern.wav.
Cite this entry: “silvern.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/silvern. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.