Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A harmless cyst, especially on the scalp or face, containing the fatty secretion of a sebaceous gland.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A runic symbol used in Anglo-Saxon up to about 1300 a.d. to represent the w-sound.
  • noun A current silver coin of Korea, equivalent to 40 United States cents.
  • noun A circumscribed benign tumor of moderate size, occurring on any part of the body, but especially on the scalp, consisting of a well-defined sac inclosing sebaceous matter.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Med.) An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun a cyst on the skin
  • noun a runic letter later replaced by w

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a common cyst of the skin; filled with fatty matter (sebum) that is secreted by a sebaceous gland that has been blocked

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English; see wen- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English wynn

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English wenn

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Examples

Comments

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  • New in reverse.

    November 2, 2007

  • This is a word that sounds lovely before you learn its meaning.

    August 9, 2009

  • Wen, the rune that became in the alphabet double-u which is actually double-v before v's and u's switched places in the English alphabet. This raises other questions. Linguistics anyone?

    November 2, 2013

  • "In 2015, our team published a pilot study on a 1,000-year old recipe called Bald’s eyesalve from “Bald’s Leechbook,” an Old English medical text. The eyesalve was to be used against a “wen,” which may be translated as a sty, or an infection of the eyelash follicle."

    -- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/getting-medieval-on-bacteria-ancient-books-may-point-to-new-antibiotics/

    April 19, 2017