Maine
adj, name, noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Obsolete form of main. alt-of, obsolete
"No man is an Iland, intire of it ſelfe; euery man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; […]"
- 1 Obsolete form of main. alt-of, not-comparable, obsolete
- 1 A former province of Pays de la Loire, France. Capital: Le Mans.
- 2 A river in Maine-et-Loire department, Pays de la Loire, France, a tributary of the Loire, flowing 12 km through the city of Angers from the confluence of the Mayenne and Sarthe into the Loire.
- 3 A Scottish and English surname from Old French, a variant of Main.
- 4 A river in County Kerry, Ireland, flowing 43 km from Tobermaing into the Atlantic at Castlemaine.
- 5 A male given name from Old Irish, of historical usage, notably borne by Irish kings Maine mac Cerbaill and Maine mac Néill.
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- 6 Alternative form of Main: A river in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. alt-of, alternative
- 7 A state of the United States; probably named for the province in France. Capital: Augusta. Largest city: Portland.
"These first English migrants to Jamestown endured terrible disease and arrived during a period of drought and colder-than-normal winters. The migrants to Roanoke on the outer banks of Carolina, where the English had gone in the 1580s, disappeared. And a brief effort to settle the coast of Maine in 1607 and 1608 failed because of an unusually bitter winter."
- 8 A village in Marathon County, Wisconsin; named for county sheriff Uriah E. Maine.
- 9 A town in New York.
- 10 A town in Outagamie County, Wisconsin; named for the state.
- 11 A river in Maine, United States, flowing 5.5 miles from Pocomoonshine Lake in Princeton into Crawford Lake in Crawford.
- 12 University of Maine.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The Applachian Trail ends in Maine."
Etymology
The US state is from French Maine, named by its French explorers after the province in France with the same name; unrelated to the name of the river that flows through it. From Old French Cemaine, from Latin *Cenomania, from the name of the Gaulish Cenomani tribe of Gallia Celtica. The word was rebracketed as ce (“this”) + Maine, and the ce- was lost by the 12th century.
From French Maine, from earlier Maienne, from Latin Meduāna, of uncertain origin. Doublet of Mayenne. Unrelated to the French province of the same name.
From Irish An Mhaing
From Old Irish Maine.
Related phrases
More for "maine"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.