Word.ws English Dictionary

witan

/ˈwɪtən/

witan noun: the Anglo-Saxon national council or witenagemot.

Noun

witan (plural witans)

  1. The Anglo-Saxon national council or witenagemot.
    • But in estimating the powers of the witan, we must not lose sight of the fact, that the king sometimes assumes a tone of superiority scarcely consistent with its independence.1833, S. A. Dunham, Europe in the Middle Ages, Green & Longman, page 48
    • The folkland, the national fund, was administered and conveyed conjointly by the king and the witan.1889, Hannis Taylor, The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution

Forms of witan

pluralwitans

Origin of witan

Learned borrowing from Old English witan, plural of wita (“wise man”).

Questions about witan

What does witan mean?
Witan means the Anglo-Saxon national council or witenagemot.
What part of speech is witan?
Witan is a noun.
How do you pronounce witan?
Witan is pronounced /ˈwɪtən/.
What is the plural of witan?
The plural of witan is witans.

Words near witan in the dictionary

  1. wit-monger
  2. wit-mongers
  3. wit-wanton
  4. wit-wantons
  5. wit.
  6. witan
  7. witans
  8. Witbeck
  9. Witbecks
  10. witbier
  11. witbiers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: witan (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: “witan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/witan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.