whin
/wɪn/
whin noun: gorse; furze (Ulex spp.).
Noun (1)
whin (countable and uncountable, plural whins)
- Gorse; furze (Ulex spp.).
- By this time he was cross the ford, / Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; / And past the birks and meikle stane, / Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; / And through the whins, and by the cairn, / Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; / And near the thorn, aboon the well, / Whare Mungo's...1790, Robert Burns, Tam o' Shanter, 1828, Thomas Park (editor), Works of the British Poets, Volume XX: The Poems of Robert Burns, page 65
- And sometimes they clambered down […] and saw the whin bushes climb black the white hills beside them and far and away the blink of lights across the moors where folk lay happed and warm.1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, in A Scots Quair, Canongate Books, published 1995, page 38
- The plant woad-waxen (Genista tinctoria).
Noun (2)
whin
Forms of whin
| plural | whins |
|---|
Origin of whin
From Middle English whynne, from Old Norse hvein (“gorse, furze”) (compare Norwegian kvein (“bent grass”), Swedish ven (“bent grass”), dialectal hven (“swamp”)), apparently from hvein (“swampy land”), from Proto-Germanic *hwainō, *hwin- (“swamp; moor”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱweyn- (“to soil; mud; filth”). Compare Latin caenum (“filth”), Latin inquīnō (“to sully; soil”).
Words formed from whin
- Brockley Whins
- moor whin
- needle whin
- petty whin
- whin bruiser
- whinchat
- whin sparrow
- whin thrush
Words that rhyme with whin
48 more rhymesFewer rhymes
- chin
- Flynn
- bin
- Quinn
- sin
- tin
- Bryn
- corinne
- inn
- din
- Finn
- grin
- kin
- lin
- linn
- unpin
- Benin
- min
- shin
- violin
- wherein
- within
- akin
- been
- begin
- brin
- chin-chin
- hin
- lyn
- mandolin
- zoom in
- agin
- agrin
- Arabian jasmine
- blin
- djinn
- Douyin
- edge in
- gimme some skin
- glyn
- herein
- jinn
- Karin
- kissing kin
- lecithin
- Nguyen
- nin
Questions about whin
- What does whin mean?
- Whin means gorse; furze (Ulex spp.).
- What part of speech is whin?
- Whin is a noun.
- How do you pronounce whin?
- Whin is pronounced /wɪn/.
- What is the plural of whin?
- The plural of whin is whins.
Words near whin in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whin (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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Cite this entry: “whin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.