wan

adjective

1. 1

   Pale, sickly-looking.

   Whome when his Lady ſaw, to him ſhe ran / With haſty ioy : to ſee him made her glad, / And ſad to view his viſage pale and wan, / Who earſt in flowres of freſhest youth was clad.

   I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, / There stood, as in an awful dream, / The army of the dead.

   Blanche smiled languidly out upon the young men, thinking whether she looked very wan and green under her rose-coloured hood, and whether it was the mirrors at Gaunt House, or the fatigue and fever of her own eyes, which made her fancy herself so pale.

   She looked wan and worried, and then finally she was not in court one day, and later [...] he learned that she was confined to her room with a bad cold.

2. 2

   Dim, faint.

   ’Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed the Prince of Gloom / For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom. / Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago; / My youth was gone and my memory wan, and I willed it even so.

3. 3

   Bland, uninterested.

   A wan expression

   My position in the midst of the general indifference was hard to bear ; my silence weighed upon me like remorse. The sight of Lieutenant Castagnac filled me with indignation, — a sort of insurmountable repulsion: the wan look, the ironical smile of the man, froze my blood.

   Checking out her brother’s khakis, the gun propped in the corner, Olivia’s hiking boots and her wan expression, she wants to laugh. “Been hunting, I see.” Olivia’s face falls, as expected. Her brother’s obsession with guns and gross little expeditions appall her.

   “I have to admit, I’ve been tempted a time or two to chuck everything to go live in a place like this [Bogda Peak, China],” he replied. / “What stopped you?” / He gave her a wan look. “Celibacy.”

noun

1. 1

   The quality of being wan; wanness.

   And while we stood beside the fount, and watch’d / Or seem’d to watch the dancing bubble, approach'd / Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep, / Or sorrow, and glowing round her dewy eyes / The circled Iris of a night of tears ; [...]

noun

1. 1

   A girl or woman.

   Then I’d tell myself there were plenty of oul wans and oul fellas in work who never got it and that I’d be lucky like them and escape. Only I didn’t. I don’t want to die.

   Growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1980s, I remember all the hard men were sinewy, scrawny lads, hence the local description ‘more meat on a seagull’. The reason was simple: they were undernourished. [...] The young wans, despite a couple of babies, were more or less the same, pinched, flat-chested and drawn.

2. 2

   Variant of onePronunciation spelling of one, representing Ireland and Glasgow English.

verb

1. 1

   Also a form of winobsoletesimple past of win.

Forms

plural

wans

comparative

wanner

superlative

wannest