Swan
nounA large, long-necked waterbird, usually white, of the duck family.
How to spell swan
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce swan
What does swan mean?
- nounA large, long-necked waterbird, usually white, of the duck family.
- verbTo move about in a relaxed, leisurely, or showy way, often without purpose.
Swan in a sentence
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noun
A single swan glided across the still lake at dawn.
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verb
He likes to swan around the office instead of doing any real work.
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noun
The park warden warned visitors not to feed bread to the swan.
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verb
They swan off to the coast every weekend while the rest of us stay home.
Where does swan come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Swan is a native Germanic word that comes straight down from Old English swan, which already named the same large white waterbird. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form swanaz, the source also of Dutch zwaan and German Schwan. Many scholars link this word group to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'to sound' or 'to sing', the same idea that gives us the word 'sound', which would make the swan literally the 'singing bird', a notion preserved in the old myth of the dying swan's song. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, while the pronunciation drifted so that the vowel now sounds like 'on' rather than 'an'. That mismatch between the written 'a' and the spoken 'o' is the one small surprise in an otherwise simple word.
How the word is built
- swan (whole native root; no prefix or suffix)
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