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Allin

Ian

proper nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈiː.ən//
  • //ˈaɪ.ən//

A male given name from Scottish Gaelic Eòin, equivalent to English John.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A male given name from Scottish Gaelic Eòin, equivalent to English John.

    “If you want a Scotch name why don’t you call him Jock?” Macgregor looked disgusted. “Because Jock is not a name, but a diminutive, as everybody knows well. It is the diminutive of John. And John is not a Scots name. The Scots form of that name is Ian. If you want to call him Ian Fetch, I shall say no more”.

    After an inquest's ruling yesterday, it is now official that the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, was unlawfully killed amid the policing of the G20 protests in 2009. Many who saw the footage the Guardian obtained, which showed PC Simon Harwood striking Mr Tomlinson just before his death, will regard the verdict as a statement of the blindingly obvious.

Etymology

Borrowed from Scottish Gaelic Eòin.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).