Yawn

How to spell yawn

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce yawn

What does yawn mean?

1. verbTo open the mouth wide and breathe in deeply, usually because of tiredness or boredom.
2. nounAn act of opening the mouth wide and breathing in, typically from tiredness or boredom.

Yawn in a sentence

• verb

  The long afternoon meeting made everyone in the room yawn.

• noun

  She stifled a yawn during the dull presentation.

• verb

  Babies often yawn just before they fall asleep.

• noun

  A sudden yawn spread around the table as the evening wore on.

Where does yawn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Yawn descends from Old English ganian and the related geonian, both meaning to gape or open the mouth wide, which over time merged into the modern form. These come from a much older Germanic root tied to the idea of opening or gaping, and the same ancient root surfaces in Latin hiare, to gape, and in the English word 'gap'. The spelling drifted across the centuries from forms like 'ganen' and 'yanen' in Middle English toward the modern 'yawn', and the unexpected 'aw' captures the long open vowel we now use. By the time the word settled, it carried both the literal sense of the involuntary deep breath we take when tired and the figurative sense of a wide opening, as in a yawning gap. That figurative use is why a chasm can be said to yawn beneath you, echoing the original meaning of gaping wide.

How the word is built

• yawn (single root from Old English ganian/geonian: to gape, open the mouth wide)