Word.ws English Dictionary

wen

/wɛn/

wen noun: a cyst on the skin; a tumor or wart. Also the obsolete form of wynn.

Noun

wen (plural wens)

  1. A cyst on the skin; a tumor or wart.
    • There was a Fellow with a Wen in his Neck, larger than five Woolpacks, and another with a couple of wooden Legs, each about twenty foot high.1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], “The Country Described. […]”, in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], →OCLC...
    • When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all--looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck--I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.1854, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Walden

Proper noun capitalized: Wen

Wen

  1. A common surname from Chinese of east Asian derivation.
    • To find out more, I spoke with CNN wellness expert Dr. Leana Wen. Wen, a mother of two young kids, is an emergency physician and adjunct associate professor at the George Washington University.2024 May 1, Katia Hetter, “Why is a mother’s mental health so important? A doctor explains”, in CNN

Also used as

wen is also the obsolete form of wynn.

wen is also the alternative spelling of when.

wen meaning in Kannada, Odia and Tagalog

wen in Kannada

ವೆನ್

wen in Odia

ୱେନ

wen in Tagalog

a cyst on the skin
butlig

Examples of wen in a sentence

  • Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway Smiles.1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:
  • I am debating whether to risk scratching the right side of my jaw, where there is a wen.1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 4:

Forms of wen

pluralwens

Plural of wen: wens

Origin of wen

From Middle English wen, wenne, from Old English wenn, wænn (“wen”), from Proto-Germanic *wanjaz. Cognate with Dutch wen (“goiter”), Low German Ween (“wen”), dialectal German Wenne (“wen”), Danish van, væne.

Inherited from Old English wynn.

Eye dialect spelling of when.

Words formed from wen

Phrases with wen

Words that rhyme with wen

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wen

What does wen mean?
Wen means a cyst on the skin; a tumor or wart.
What is wen in Kannada?
Wen in Kannada is ವೆನ್. See Wen meaning in Kannada.
How do you use wen in a sentence?
Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway Smiles.
What part of speech is wen?
Wen can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wen?
Wen is pronounced /wɛn/.
What is the plural of wen?
The plural of wen is wens.

Words near wen in the dictionary

  1. Wemple
  2. wems
  3. Wemyss
  4. Wemyss Bay
  5. Wemysses
  6. wen
  7. Wen'an
  8. Wen-Chou
  9. Wen-su
  10. Wenami
  11. WENAO

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wen (page history and authors); Wen (page history and authors); wen (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); wen (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “wen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.