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ban

verbnounnounnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbæn//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈbæn]/
  • United Kingdom//ˈban//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈban]/
  • Scotland//ˈban//

To prohibit; to interdict; to proscribe; to forbid or block from participation.

verb

  1. 1

    To prohibit; to interdict; to proscribe; to forbid or block from participation.

    Bare feet are banned in this establishment.

    To whom the goodly earth and air Are banned

    Jailing her on Wednesday, magistrate Liz Clyne told Robins: "You have shown little remorse either for the death of the kitten or the trauma to your former friend Sarah Knutton." She was also banned from keeping animals for 10 years.

    No sooner has a [synthetic] drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. These “legal highs” are sold for the few months it takes the authorities to identify and ban them, and then the cycle begins again.

  2. 2

    obsoleteTo summon; to call out.

  3. 3

    To anathematize; to pronounce an ecclesiastical curse upon; to place under a ban.

  4. 4

    To curse; to execrate.

    They will curse and ban[…]even into the deep pit of hell, all that gainsay their appetite.

  5. 5

    To curse; to utter curses or maledictions.

    :“I seldom ban, sir,” said he to the man; “but if you play any of your hound's-foot tricks, and leave puir Berwick before he's sorted, to rin after spuilzie, deil be wi' me if I do not give your craig a thraw”

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English bannen (“to summon; to banish; to curse”), partly from Old English bannan (“to summon, command, proclaim, call out”), from Proto-West Germanic *bannan; and partly from Old Norse banna (“to prohibit; to curse”), both from Proto-Germanic *bannaną (“to proclaim, to order; to summon; to ban; to curse, forbid”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰh₂-new-ti ~ bʰh₂-n̥w-énti, innovative nasal-infixed zero-grade athematic present of *bʰeh₂- (“to say”). Cognate with Dutch bannen (“to ban, exile, discard”), German bannen (“to exile, to exorcise, captivate, excommunicate”), Swedish banna (“to ban, scold”), Vedic Sanskrit भन॑ति (bhánati), Armenian բան (ban) and perhaps Albanian banoj (“to reside, dwell”). See also banal, abandon.

noun

  1. 1

    A prohibition.

    That sacred fruit, sacred to abstinence, Much more to taste it under ban to touch

    California has been on the forefront of plastic bag bans. In 2007, Mr. Newsom, as mayor of San Francisco, signed a law that made the city the first in the nation to ban plastic bags in grocery stores.

    The community also has faced political setbacks in recent years as states passed a flurry of laws, including health care bans like the one at issue in the case and measures that prohibit trans students from participating on sports teams that are consistent with their gender identity.

  2. 2

    A public proclamation or edict; also, a summons by public proclamation, and in early use especially a summons to arms.

    Bans is common and ordinary amongst the Feudists, and signifies a proclamation, or any publike notice.

  3. 3

    The gathering of the (French) king’s vassals for war; the whole body of vassals assembled this way, or liable to be summoned; originally the same as arriere-ban, but distinct since the 16th century, following French usage—see arriere-ban.

    […] he hath sente abroade to assemble his van and arriere van; wherby, and with the reste of his forces, he prepareth him selfe to enter this countrey; […]

    […] all the Ban and the Arrierban, are met arm’d in the field, to choose a King […]

    France was at such a Pinch for Men, […] that they call’d their Ban and Arriere Ban, the assembling whereof had been long disus’ed, and in a Manner antiquated.

    The ban was sometimes convoked, that is, the possessors of the fiefs were called upon for military service in subsequent ages; but with more of ostentation than real efficiency.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA curse or anathema.

    With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected

  5. 5

    A pecuniary mulct or penalty laid upon a delinquent for offending against a ban, such as a mulct paid to a bishop by one guilty of sacrilege or other crimes.

noun

  1. 1

    A subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Romanian leu.

  2. 2

    A subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Moldovan leu.

Etymology

Borrowed from Romanian ban of uncertain origin, perhaps from Serbo-Croatian bân.

noun

  1. 1

    A unit measuring information or entropy based on base-ten logarithms, rather than the base-two logarithms that define the bit.

Etymology

From Banburismus; coined by Alan Turing.

noun

  1. 1

    A title used in several states in central and south-eastern Europe between the 7th century and the 20th century.

Etymology

From South Slavic (compare Serbo-Croatian bȃn), from Proto-Slavic *banъ; see there for more.

Forms

plural
bans, bani
past tense
banned
past participle
banned
present participle
banning
third person singular
bans
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).