Nan

How to spell nan

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nan

What does nan mean?

1. nounAn informal, affectionate word for one's grandmother.
2. nounA soft, leavened flatbread common in South Asian cooking.

Nan in a sentence

• My nan always bakes a sponge cake for the family gathering.

• The curry arrived with a piece of warm nan straight from the oven.

• The children visited their nan every Sunday afternoon.

• He tore off some garlic nan to scoop up the rich sauce.

Where does nan come from?

Language of origin: Other

This short word carries two quite separate stories under one spelling. In its commonest British use, meaning a grandmother, 'nan' is a clipped form of 'nana', itself a nursery reduplication of the kind small children produce naturally, closely related to 'nanny'; it has been used affectionately in spoken English since at least the nineteenth century. The food sense, a soft flatbread, comes instead from Persian and Hindustani 'nan', simply meaning 'bread', which travelled into English with South Asian cookery and is more often written 'naan' but also appears in this shorter spelling. Because both senses are so brief and phonetically plain, the spelling itself rarely changes, although the bread sense competes with the longer 'naan' form. The two meanings have no shared ancestry at all; they merely landed on the same three letters. That coincidence is the only real trap, since a writer must decide from context whether a grandmother or a loaf is meant.

How the word is built

• nan (single unanalysable word; the family sense is a shortened, doubled nursery form of 'nana', while the bread sense is a direct borrowing with no internal parts)