wern

English

Etymology 1

See warn.

Verb

wern (third-person singular simple present werns, present participle werning, simple past and past participle werned)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To refuse.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for wern in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913)

Etymology 2

From Middle English weren, equivalent to were +‎ -en.

Verb

wern

  1. (obsolete) plural simple past of be
    • c. 1450, The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
      And thanne he seide to other folkes that thei shulde seye somme goode thinges for to recomforte the lordes and the people, which werne in grete trouble as for the deth of the moste noble kinge that ever was.
    • 1469, Margaret Paston, The Paston Letters:
      And she rehearsed what she had said, and said if tho words made it not sure she said boldly that she would make it surer ere than she went thence; for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound, whatsoever the words wern.
    • 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto 2
      ALL THREE AS ONE, THE FIRST HIGHT PRIAMOND,
      THE SECOND DYAMOND, THE YOUNGEST TRIAMOND.”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938:
      Her name was Agape whose children werne
    • 1910, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, Glasgerion in The Oxford Book of English Verse
      Through the falseness of that lither lad
      These three lives wern all gone.

Anagrams

Middle English

Verb

wern

  1. Alternative form of weren
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