wan

Adjective

wan (comparative wanner, superlative wannest)

1. Pale, sickly-looking.
   • Whome when his Lady ſaw, to him ſhe ran / With haſty ioy : to ſee him made her glad, / And ſad to view his viſage pale and wan, / Who earſt in flowres of freſhest youth was clad.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 42, page 116
   • I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, / There stood, as in an awful dream, / The army of the dead.1838 October, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Beleaguered City”, in Voices of the Night, Cambridge, Mass.: […] John Owen, published 1839, →OCLC, stanzas 1–2, page 22

   Synonyms:

   ashen, pasty, ashen-faced, ashy, blake, blanched, bleak, bloodless, chalky, exsanguious

2. Dim, faint.
   • ’Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed the Prince of Gloom / For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom. / Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago; / My youth was gone and my memory wan, and I willed it even so.1909, Robert W[illiam] Service, “The Ballad of One-eyed Mike”, in Ballads of a Cheechako, Toronto, Ont.: William Briggs, →OCLC, stanza 5, page 52

   Synonyms:

   dull, dun, leaden, uncolorful, bland, colourless, dim, dingy, faint, lackluster

   Antonyms:

   colorful, colorific, coloury, aurora-colored (US) / aurora-coloured, colorful (US) / colourful, discolored [⇒ thesaurus] (US, obsolete) / discoloured, kaleidoscopic, many-coloured, motley

3. Bland, uninterested.
   • A wan expression
   • My position in the midst of the general indifference was hard to bear ; my silence weighed upon me like remorse. The sight of Lieutenant Castagnac filled me with indignation, — a sort of insurmountable repulsion: the wan look, the ironical smile of the man, froze my blood.1867 July 13, “Lieutenant Castagnac”, in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading, Selected from Foreign Current Literature, volume IV, number 80, Cambridge, Mass.: Printed at the University...

   Synonyms:

   insipid, lackluster, banal, basic, mindless, beat, blah, commonplace, bland, boring

Noun (1)

wan (uncountable)

1. The quality of being wan; wanness.
   • And while we stood beside the fount, and watch’d / Or seem’d to watch the dancing bubble, approach'd / Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep, / Or sorrow, and glowing round her dewy eyes / The circled Iris of a night of tears ; [...]1847, Alfred Tennyson, “Part III”, in The Princess: A Medley, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 47

   Synonyms:

   achromatism, decolouration, paleness, pallidity, pallor

Noun (2)

wan (plural wans)

1. (Ireland) A girl or woman.
   • Then I’d tell myself there were plenty of oul wans and oul fellas in work who never got it and that I’d be lucky like them and escape. Only I didn’t. I don’t want to die.1993, Elaine Crowley, The Ways Of Women, London: Orion, →ISBN
   • Growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1980s, I remember all the hard men were sinewy, scrawny lads, hence the local description ‘more meat on a seagull’. The reason was simple: they were undernourished. [...] The young wans, despite a couple of babies, were more or less the same, pinched, flat-chested...2005, David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, →ISBN; republished as The Pope’s Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland’s New Elite...

   Synonyms:

   lass, maid, babe, bint, bird, cake, chick, colleen, cutty, damoiselle

Noun (3) capitalized: WAN

IPA/wæn/

WAN (plural WANs)

1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of wide area network.
   • Message latency is much more of an issue on a WAN than on a LAN.

Proper noun capitalized: Wan

Wan (plural Wans)

1. A surname.