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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

haven.

THE SHORT MEANING

A sheltered, welcoming place.

Connection

5 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈheɪvən/
  1. A harbour or anchorage protected from the sea.

    dated
  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.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English haven, havene, from Old English hæfen (“haven; harbour; port”), either from Proto-West Germanic *habanu or Old Norse hǫfn, 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.

verb/ˈheɪvən/
  1. To put into, or provide with a haven.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English haven, havene, from Old English hæfen (“haven; harbour; port”), either from Proto-West Germanic *habanu or Old Norse hǫfn, 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.

verb
  1. plural simple present of have

    form-of · obsolete · plural · present
Where this word comes from

From Middle English haven; equivalent to have + -en (plural simple present ending).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

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Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.