haven

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A harbour or anchorage protected from the sea.
  2. A safe place.
  3. A peaceful or tranquil place.
  4. A certain type of function on sets of vertices in an undirected graph, able to be used by an evader to win a pursuit-evasion game on the graph.
verb
  1. To put into, or provide with a haven.
verb
  1. plural simple present of have
name
  1. A surname.
  2. A unisex given name of modern usage.
  3. A place in the United States:
  4. A city in Reno County, Kansas.
  5. A township in Sherburne County, Minnesota, named after John Ormsbee Haven.
  6. A hamlet in Sullivan County, New York.
  7. A ghost town in Grant County, Washington.
  8. An unincorporated community in the town of Mosel, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.
  9. A town in the Rural City of Horsham, Victoria, Australia.

Pronunciation

/ˈheɪvən/ En-us-haven.ogg

Word forms

haven havens havening havened

Etymology

From Middle English haven, havene, from Old English hæfen (“haven; harbour; port”), from Proto-West Germanic *habanu, from Proto-Germanic *habnō, *habanō (compare Dutch haven, German Hafen, Norwegian/Danish havn, Swedish hamn, French havre), from Proto-Germanic *habą (“sea”) (compare Old English hæf, Middle Low German haf, Old Norse haf (“sea”), German Haff (“bay or lagoon behind a spit”), perhaps, in the sense of "heaving sea", etymologically identical with Old Norse haf (“heaving, lifting, uplift, elevation”), derived from Proto-Germanic *habjaną (“to lift, heave”)), or from Proto-Indo-European *kh₂pnós (compare Old Irish cúan (“harbor, recess, haven”)). Doublet of abra.

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