Ent
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Initialism of ear, nose and throat. abbreviation, alt-of, countable, initialism, uncountable
- 2 A large, fictional, humanoid, walking tree in works by J. R. R. Tolkien.
"[…]and that fine young ent Quickbeam is merely a minor crux in an Old English glossary (the name Quickbeam means 'living tree' in Old English)."
- 3 Alternative letter-case form of ent. alt-of
"The strange words and names that the Hobbits record as used by Treebeard and other Ents are thus Elvish, or fragments of Elf-speech strung together in Ent-fashion."
- 4 An otorhinolaryngologist; an ear, nose and throat doctor. countable, uncountable
- 1 To pour, especially of rain. Cornwall
""[…] ent me out some beer, / Fill up my glass to quinch my thust, Weth bitter like thee'st gove me fust.""
Example
More examples"A curious German word is "entfernen" (to put some distance between), because the prefix "ent-" means to take something away, in this case the distance, but taking away the distance would mean to bring it closer which is the exact opposite of what the word "entfernen" means."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Old English ent (“giant”), from Proto-West Germanic *anti; introduced by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–55, as Ent. Compare Middle English *ent, eont (“giant”), inherited from the Old English word, but which apparently did not survive through the Middle English period into Modern times. Apparently survived in some German dialects as Enz (“giant”), also in composite forms. Compare ettin.
Possibly from empty, through assimilation of /m/ to the following /t/.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.