Pan

How to spell pan

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pan

What does pan mean?

1. nounA shallow metal container with a handle, used for frying, heating, or cooking food.
2. verbTo severely criticise something, especially in a published review.
3. verbTo swivel a camera horizontally across a scene to follow action or reveal a view.
4. verbTo wash gravel or sand in a shallow dish to separate out gold or other valuable particles.

Pan in a sentence

• noun

  She heated a little oil in the pan before adding the onions.

• verb

  Reviewers tend to pan films that rely too heavily on special effects.

• verb

  The director asked the operator to pan slowly across the crowded square.

• verb

  Tourists at the old mine learn how to pan for gold in the cold stream.

• noun

  The non-stick pan made cleaning up after breakfast much easier.

• verb

  Critics did not pan her debut novel; in fact they praised it warmly.

Where does pan come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Pan comes from Old English panne, a shallow open container used for cooking, and it belongs to a family of similar words found across the West Germanic languages, including Old Saxon panna and Old High German pfanna. Many scholars think these Germanic forms were themselves borrowed very early from the Latin patina, meaning a broad, shallow dish or pan, which in turn echoes the Greek patane for a flat dish. The cooking sense has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, while the spelling simply shed its final vowel and doubled consonant to become the tidy three-letter word we use today. From the literal vessel grew a string of practical extensions: prospectors began to pan for gold by swirling gravel in a shallow dish, film crews learned to pan a camera in a smooth sweep (a clipped form of panorama), and critics began to pan a show, comparing a harsh review to scouring out the worthless gravel. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling itself causes almost no trouble for adults.

How the word is built

• pan (single root from Old English panne, a shallow vessel); no prefix or suffix