swain.
A young man or boy in service; a servant.
Meaning & usage
A young man or boy in service; a servant.
A knight's servant; an attendant.
A country labourer; a countryman, a rustic.
A rural lover; a male sweetheart in a pastoral setting.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English swayn, swain, sweyn, swein, from Old English sweġen (attested also as personal name Swein, Sweġen), from Old Norse sveinn, from Proto-Germanic *swainaz (“relative, young man, servant”), from Proto-Indo-European *swé (“oneself; separate; apart”), thus properly one's own. Cognate with Danish svend (“hireling, young man”), Norwegian svein (“lad, young man, servant”) Icelandic sveinn (“boy, lad, servant”), Swedish sven (“swain, servant”), Low German Sween, dialectal German Schwein, Old English swān (“swineherd, lad”).
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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.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.