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thin

adjectivenounverbadverbcommon in dialogue

  • New Zealand//ˈθən//
  • //ˈθɪn//
  • //ˈfɪn//

Having little thickness or extent from one surface to its opposite.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having little thickness or extent from one surface to its opposite.

    thin plate of metal; thin paper; thin board; thin covering

    Out of spite, the human beings pretended not to believe that it was Snowball who had destroyed the windmill: they said that it had fallen down because the walls were too thin.

    However, the misconception regarding skin hitboxes was created by a subset of players who believed that wearing thinner skins enhanced their gameplay.

  2. 2

    Very narrow in all diameters; having a cross section that is small in all directions.

    thin wire; thin string

    Typically, osteoporosis causes the amount of trabecular bone to be reduced and the bone to become thinner, while the intertrabecular space enlarges and the interconnected structure of trabecular bone is disrupted.

  3. 3

    Having little body fat or flesh; slim; slender; lean; gaunt.

    thin person

  4. 4

    Of low viscosity or low specific gravity.

    Water is thinner than honey.

  5. 5

    Scarce; not close, crowded, or numerous; not filling the space.

    The trees of a forest are thin; the corn or grass is thin.

    Ferrara is very large, but extremely thin of people.

  6. 6

    Describing a poorly played golf shot where the ball is struck by the bottom part of the club head. See fat, shank, toe.

  7. 7

    Lacking body or volume; small; feeble; not full.

    a thin, tight-lipped smile

    thin, hollow sounds, and lamentable screams

  8. 8

    Slight; small; slender; flimsy; superficial; inadequate; not sufficient for a covering.

    a thin disguise

  9. 9

    Of a route: relatively little used.

    In short, we previously found that thin routes benefit from an increase in competition in the Spanish airline market when considering routes that were monopoly routes in 2001.

  10. 10

    Poor; scanty; without money or success.

    Like their friends the "draggers," the "hoisters" or shoplifters are having a thin time these days, […]

Etymology

From Middle English thinne, thünne, thenne, from Old English þynne, from Proto-West Germanic *þunnī, from Proto-Germanic *þunnuz (“thin”) – compare *þanjaną (“to stretch, spread out”) – from Proto-Indo-European *ténh₂us (“thin”), from *ten- (“to stretch”). Cognate with German dünn, Dutch dun, West Frisian tin, Icelandic þunnur, Danish tynd, Swedish tunn, Latin tenuis, Irish tanaí, Welsh tenau, Latvian tievs, Polish cienki, Russian тонкий (tonkij), Sanskrit तनु (tanú, “thin”), Persian تنگ (tang, “narrow”). Doublet of tenuis. Also related to tenuous.

noun

  1. 1

    A loss or tearing of paper from the back of a stamp, although not sufficient to create a complete hole.

  2. 2

    Any food produced or served in thin slices.

    chocolate mint thins

    potato thins

    wheat thins

verb

  1. 1

    To make thin or thinner.

    Exhausted fathers thinned the blood, You curse the legacy of pain; Darling of an infected brood, You feel disaster climb the vein.

  2. 2

    To become thin or thinner.

    The crowds thinned after the procession had passed: there was nothing more to see.

  3. 3

    To dilute.

  4. 4

    To remove some plants or parts of plants in order to improve the growth of what remains.

    So floriferous are Asian pears, and the tree so laden with young fruit, that as the tree approaches maturity it is worth considering thinning the fruit (I can't quite bring myself to thin the flowers) so as to neither overburden the tree for this year nor tire it for the next. Thinning early in the season, while the fruit is small, is ideal.

adverb

  1. 1

    Not thickly or closely; in a scattered state.

    seed sown thin

    Spain is a nation thin sown of people.

Forms

plural
thins
comparative
thinner, more thin
superlative
thinnest, most thin
past tense
thinned
past participle
thinned
present participle
thinning
third person singular
thins
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).