own
/oʊn/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.74 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Belonging to; possessed; acquired and designated by; proper to; property of; titled to; held in one's name; under/using the name of. Often marks a possessive determiner as reflexive, referring back to the subject of the clause or sentence.
adj
Not shared.
verb
To have rightful possession of (property, goods or capital); to have legal title to; to acquire a property or asset.
Transitive verb
verb
To have recognized political sovereignty over a place, territory, as distinct from the ordinary connotation of property ownership.
Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "The fathers shall not bee put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: euery man shall be put to death for his owne sinne."
- "Prospero: Fairely ſpoke ; / Sit then, and talke with her, ſhe is thine owne ;"
- "I corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields, in no very mild state of fear of that gentleman's wife, whose vigilance was seldom relaxed. And thus we came by a circuitous route to Mohair, the judge occupied by his own guilty thoughts, and I by others not less disturbing."
- "He looked round the poor room, at the distempered walls, and the bad engravings in meretricious frames, the crinkly paper and wax flowers on the chiffonier; and he thought of a room like Father Bryan's, with panelling, with cut glass, with tulips in silver pots, such a room as he had hoped to have for his own."
- "The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. Web companies like to boast about […], or offering services that let you[…] "share the things you love with the world" and so on. But the real way to build a successful online business is to be better than your rivals at undermining people's control of their own attention."
- "When we move into the new house, the kids will each have their own bedroom."
Etymology
From Middle English oun, owen, from Old English āgen (“own, proper, peculiar”), originally the past participle of āgan; from Proto-West Germanic *aigan (“own”), from Proto-Germanic *aiganaz (“own”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eyḱ- (“to have, possess”). Doublet of eigen-. Cognates Cognate with Scots ain, awin, awn, ayn (“own”), Saterland Frisian oain (“own”), West Frisian, Dutch, and German eigen (“own”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Swedish egen (“own”), Faroese egin (“own”), Icelandic eigin, eiginn (“own”), Norwegian Nynorsk eigen (“own”); also Ossetian исын (isyn, “to take”), Tocharian A and Tocharian B aik- (“to know, recognize”), Sanskrit ईश (īśa, “owning, possessing”). Originally past participle of the verb at hand in English owe.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /oʊn/
- British English: /əʊn/