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Whin

//wɪn// noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Gorse; furze (Ulex spp.). countable, uncountable

    "1790, Robert Burns, Tam o' Shanter, 1828, Thomas Park (editor), Works of the British Poets, Volume XX: The Poems of Robert Burns, page 65, By this time he was cross the ford, / Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; / And past the birks and meikle stane, / Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; / And through the whins, and by the cairn, / Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; / And near the thorn, aboon the well, / Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel."

  2. 2
    Whinstone.
  3. 3
    any of various hard colored rocks (especially rocks consisting of chert or basalt) wordnet
  4. 4
    The plant woad-waxen (Genista tinctoria). countable, uncountable
  5. 5
    small Eurasian shrub having clusters of yellow flowers that yield a dye; common as a weed in Britain and the United States; sometimes grown as an ornamental wordnet
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  1. 6
    very spiny and dense evergreen shrub with fragrant golden-yellow flowers; common throughout western Europe wordnet

Etymology

From Middle English whynne, from Old Norse hvein (“gorse, furze”) (compare Norwegian kvein (“bent grass”), Swedish ven (“bent grass”), dialectal hven (“swamp”)), apparently from hvein (“swampy land”), from Proto-Germanic *hwainō, *hwin- (“swamp; moor”), from Proto-Indo-European *ḱʷeyn- (“to soil; mud; filth”). Compare Latin caenum (“filth”), Latin inquīnō (“to sully; soil”).

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