- 1蒼白虛弱的、有氣無力的（形容臉色或笑容）；（光線）微弱慘淡。注意：不是單純的「白」或「白皙」，一定帶著病弱、疲累的感覺，wan smile 多半譯成「勉強的、無力的笑」。
If someone looks wan, their face has lost its colour and they look weak, ill, or very tired. It is a quiet, written-feeling word — you meet it in novels far more than in conversation. A wan face is a pale face, but not just pale: it carries the idea that something has drained the person, so we use it after illness, after bad news, after a long night, after crying.
The most common use in modern English is 'a wan smile'. That means a small, weak smile from someone who is sad, tired, or being brave. If a friend has just failed an exam and you ask if they are okay, and they smile a little without any energy, that is a wan smile.
The word also stretches to light. A wan light, a wan moon, a wan winter sun — a light that is pale and weak and does not really warm or brighten anything. Writers like this use because it makes the whole scene feel low and tired, not only a person's face.
One thing worth knowing: in Old English the word actually meant 'dark' or 'gloomy', the opposite of pale. Somewhere along the way it turned around and settled on 'pale, sickly'. The old meaning is dead now — nobody uses it — but it explains why the word still feels shadowed rather than simply light-coloured. Wan is not 'fair skin' and never a compliment.
From the word’s history
From Middle English wan 'grey, pale, ashen', from Old English wann 'dark, dusky'.
源自古英文 wann「昏暗、陰沉的」。
組成Does not split into pieces. From Old English wann, which meant 'dark, gloomy' — the sense flipped over the centuries to today's 'pale, sickly'. The older origin before that is uncertain.
原始詞典資料9 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Wanname
- 1
A surname.
wanadj詞源 1/wɒn/
- 1
Pale, sickly-looking.
- Whome when his Lady ſaw, to him ſhe ran / With haſty ioy : to ſee him made her glad, / And ſad to view his viſage pale and wan, / Who earſt in flowres of freſhest youth was clad.
- I have read in some old marvellous tale, / Some legend strange and vague, / That a midnight host of spectres pale / Beleaguered the walls of Prague. // Beside the Moldau’s rushing stream, / With the wan moon overhead, / There stood, as in an awful dream, / The army of the dead.
- 2
Dim, faint.
- ’Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed the Prince of Gloom / For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom. / Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago; / My youth was gone and my memory wan, and I willed it even so.
- 3
Bland, uninterested.
- A wan expression
- My position in the midst of the general indifference was hard to bear ; my silence weighed upon me like remorse. The sight of Lieutenant Castagnac filled me with indignation, — a sort of insurmountable repulsion: the wan look, the ironical smile of the man, froze my blood.
wannoun詞源 1/wɒn/
- 1
The quality of being wan; wanness.
- And while we stood beside the fount, and watch’d / Or seem’d to watch the dancing bubble, approach'd / Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep, / Or sorrow, and glowing round her dewy eyes / The circled Iris of a night of tears ; [...]
wannoun詞源 2
- 1
A girl or woman.
- Then I’d tell myself there were plenty of oul wans and oul fellas in work who never got it and that I’d be lucky like them and escape. Only I didn’t. I don’t want to die.
- Growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1980s, I remember all the hard men were sinewy, scrawny lads, hence the local description ‘more meat on a seagull’. The reason was simple: they were undernourished. [...] The young wans, despite a couple of babies, were more or less the same, pinched, flat-chested and drawn.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。