Ean
name, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To bring forth young; to yean. obsolete, transitive
"That I was shipp'd at sea, I well remember, Even on my eaning time; but whether there Deliver'd, by the holy gods, I cannot rightly say."
- 1 Initialism of European Article Numbering: a barcode symbology whose main variant, EAN-13, encodes thirteen digits, differing from UPC-A in that three of the digits in the left half are reversed so as to encode an additional digit. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
- 2 Acronym of enriched air nitrox. abbreviation, acronym, alt-of
Example
More examples"That I was shipp'd at sea, I well remember, Even on my eaning time; but whether there Deliver'd, by the holy gods, I cannot rightly say."
Etymology
From Middle English enen, from Old English ēanian (“to yean, bring forth young, bring forth lambs”), from Proto-West Germanic *aunōn, from Proto-Germanic *aunōną (“to bring forth lambs”). An alternate etymology derives the Old English word from a corruption of Old English ēacnian (“to add, increase, be enlarged, be augmented, become pregnant, conceive, bring forth, produce”), from ēacen (“increased, augmented”), from ēaca (“an addition, increase, eeking”), from Proto-Germanic *aukô (“increase”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ewg- (“to increase”). More at eke.
Related phrases
More for "ean"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.