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Allin

fasten

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈfɑːsn̩//
  • United States//ˈfæsn̩//

To attach or connect in a secure manner.

verb

  1. 1

    To attach or connect in a secure manner.

    The sailor fastened the boat to the dock with a half-hitch.

    Fasten your seat belts!

    Can you fasten these boards together with some nails?

    The words Whig and Tory have been pressed to the service of many successions of parties, with very different ideas fastened to them.

  2. 2

    To cause to take close effect; to make to tell; to land.

    to fasten a blow

    if I can fasten but one cup upon him

Etymology

From Middle English fastenen, from Old English fæstnian, from Proto-West Germanic *fastinōn (“to secure, fasten”). Equivalent to fast + -en.

Forms

past tense
fastened
past participle
fastened
present participle
fastening
third person singular
fastens
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).