Word.ws English Dictionary

wannest

wannest is the superlative form of wan.

Meaning of 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
  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
    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

See all 6 meanings of wan

Questions about wannest

What is wannest the superlative form of?
Wannest is the superlative form of wan.

Words near wannest in the dictionary

  1. wanner
  2. Wanneroo
  3. Wanners
  4. wanness
  5. wannesses
  6. wannest
  7. Wannian
  8. Wannier function
  9. Wannier functions
  10. wannigan
  11. wannigans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wannest (page history and authors); wan (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)-Wodencafe-wannest.wav.

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