Taken

//ˈteɪ.kn̩// adj, verb, slang

adj, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    past participle of take form-of, participle, past

    "No doubt many a journey you have rode and gone, and many a hard daies labour you have taken, and ſharpened perhaps with care and grief[…]"

Adjective
  1. 1
    Infatuated; fond of or attracted to. not-comparable

    "He was very taken with the girl, I hear."

  2. 2
    In a serious romantic relationship. informal, not-comparable

    "I can't ask her out, she's taken."

Adjective
  1. 1
    be affected with an indisposition wordnet
  2. 2
    understood in a certain way; made sense of wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
affectedassumedbesottedin loveinfatuatedinterpreted

Example

More examples

"Spenser's sarcastic and joking remarks are often misinterpreted as signs of ambivalence and often taken too seriously."

Etymology

From Middle English taken, takenn, from Old English tacen, *ġetacen, from Old Norse tekinn, from Proto-Germanic *tēkanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *tēkaną (“to take; grasp; touch”). Cognate with Scots takin, tane, Danish tagen, Swedish tagen, Icelandic tekin. Morphologically take + -n.

Related phrases

is this seat takentaken aback

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.