Other forms: fans, fanned, fanning
A fan is the thing with turning blades that pushes air at you — the one on the ceiling, the small one on your desk in August, the one whirring away inside a laptop. A hand fan is the folding kind you open and wave at your own face.
The other fan is a person: someone who loves a team, a band, a writer, and keeps following them. Football fans, fan mail, a fan club, a fan of strong coffee — and it always takes of. As a verb you fan yourself with a magazine, and wind fans a fire until it takes hold. Anything spreading out in a wide curve fans out: the search party fanned out across the field. Two of these are not the same word at all, which the history below explains.
1nounfanA machine with turning blades that moves air about a room.~31%
“Turn the fan on; it is far too hot in here.”
2nounsupporterSomeone who admires a team, a performer or a thing and follows it closely.~61%
“Thousands of fans waited outside the stadium in the rain.”
synonyms: admirer, follower, enthusiast
3verbanythingTo move air over something with a fan or anything flat.~2%
“She fanned herself with the programme through the whole second half.”
4verbspreadTo spread out into a wide shape from one point.~6%
“The police fanned out across the park.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 142 sentences found in the wild and placed 107 of them on a sense (35 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Two different words wearing the same three letters. The machine goes back to Old English fann, from Latin vannus, the basket farmers used to toss grain into the air so the wind could carry the husks off — the root behind it means simply to blow. The supporter is American baseball slang: fanatic cut short.
Middle English
fan
English, today
fan
From Middle English fan. Middle English fan, Old English fann (“a winnowing, fan”), Latin vannus (“fan for winnowing grain”), Proto-Indo-European h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA