Word.ws English Dictionary

thornen

thornen adjective: made of or consisting of thorns.

Adjective

thornen (comparative more thornen, superlative most thornen)

  1. (dialectal, obsolete) Made of or consisting of thorns.
    • In that district it was a favourite remedy for scald head in a baby to hang cotton wool on a "thornen hedge" by moonlight.1897, Frederick Hancock, The parish of Selworthy in the county of Somerset, page 233

Forms of thornen

comparativemore thornen
superlativemost thornen

Origin of thornen

From Middle English thornen, from Old English þyrnen (“thorny, of thorns”), from Proto-West Germanic *þurnīn, from Proto-Germanic *þurnīnaz (“of thorns”), equivalent to thorn + -en.

Questions about thornen

What does thornen mean?
Thornen means made of or consisting of thorns.
What part of speech is thornen?
Thornen is an adjective.

Words near thornen in the dictionary

  1. thorned
  2. Thornell
  3. Thornells
  4. Thorneloe
  5. Thorneloes
  6. thornen
  7. Thorner
  8. thorneries
  9. thornery
  10. Thornewell
  11. Thorney

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thornen (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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