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bran

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɹæn//

The broken coat of the seed of wheat, rye, or other cereal grain, separated from the flour or meal by sifting or bolting; the coarse, chaffy part of ground grain.

noun

  1. 1

    The broken coat of the seed of wheat, rye, or other cereal grain, separated from the flour or meal by sifting or bolting; the coarse, chaffy part of ground grain.

Etymology

From Middle English bran, branne, bren, from Old French bren, bran (“bran, filth”), from Gaulish brennos (“rotten”), from Proto-Celtic *bragnos (“rotten, foul”) (compare Welsh braen (“stench”), Irish bréan (“rancid”), Walloon brin (“excrement”)), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰreHg- (compare Latin fragrāre (“to smell strongly”), Dutch brak (“hound”)).

verb

  1. 1

    To clean (metal) using a branner.

noun

  1. 1

    The European carrion crow.

Etymology

From a Celtic source; compare Welsh brân and Cornish bran.

Forms

plural
brans
past tense
branned
past participle
branned
present participle
branning
third person singular
brans
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).