Other forms: dens
A den is where a wild animal sleeps and raises its young — a hole under tree roots for a fox, a cave for a bear, a scrape of flattened grass for a lion. It is the one place they come back to.
Children build dens out of chairs and blankets and defend them all afternoon, and in an American house a den is the small comfortable room with the television in it, the one the family actually sits in. The word also goes dark: a gambling den, an opium den, a den of thieves — a den is where something hidden carries on. And walking into the lion's den means facing a room full of people who are against you.
1noundenThe home of a wild animal, where it shelters and raises its young.~45%
“The fox dragged the chicken back to its den.”
synonyms: burrow
2nounshelterA shelter children build out of whatever is lying around.~2%
“The boys built a den out of two chairs and a sheet.”
3nounhideoutA place where something secret or illegal goes on.~21%
“Police found a gambling den above the shop.”
synonyms: hideout
4nounsmallA small comfortable room in a house, used for sitting and working. Mostly American.~32%
“He watches the match in the den with the door shut.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 156 sentences found in the wild and placed 46 of them on a sense (110 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
den is a shelter.
Also accepted in games: lair
Old English denn was a beast's lair — and also a patch of woodland where pigs were turned out to feed. Behind it sits a Germanic word for the floor of a barn, the flat beaten ground where grain was threshed, which German still calls a Tenne. Before a den was a home, it was a floor.
Proto-West Germanic
*dani — threshing-floor, barn-floor
Old English
denn — den, lair (of a beast), cave; a swine-pasture, a woodland pasture for swine
Middle English
den
English, today
den
From Middle English den, from Old English denn (“den, lair (of a beast), cave; a swine-pasture, a woodland pasture for swine”), from Proto-West Germanic dani (“threshing-floor, barn-floor”). Cognate with Scots den (“den, lair”), Middle Dutch denne (“burrow, den, cave, attic”), Dutch den (“ship's deck, threshing-floor, mountain floor”), Middle Low German denne, danne (“threshing-floor, small dale”), German Tenne (“threshing-floor, barn for threshing”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA