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haven

UK/ˈheɪvən/US/ˈheɪvən/
nounB12 meaningsOne of the most common words in English · #124 of 15,258mostly spoken

Other forms: havens

A haven is a place where you are safe and nothing can get at you. A warm kitchen in a storm, a quiet library on a loud day, a cove where a small boat waits out the weather.

That cove is the oldest sense: a haven was a harbour, and Dutch haven and German Hafen still mean exactly that. English keeps the harbour meaning but leans on the figurative one — a haven for wildlife, a haven of calm, a safe haven for refugees. Money borrowed it too: a tax haven is a country where money goes to shelter. Do not mix haven up with heaven. They look close on the page, sound different, and have no connection at all.

Definitions of haven

  1. 1nounhavenA place of safety and shelter.B1

    “The old barn became a haven for owls.”

    synonyms: refuge, sanctuary

  2. 2nounharbourA harbour where ships can shelter.B2

    “The fleet ran for the nearest haven.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

haven is a place of safety.

Phrases it lives in

  • safe haven — a protected place; also an investment thought to hold its value in bad times
  • tax haven — a country with very low taxes where companies keep their money

Where it comes from

Haven began as Old English hæfen, a harbour or port, and its cousins still do that job: Dutch haven, German Hafen, Swedish hamn. Deeper down sits Proto-Germanic *habą, 'sea' — perhaps the heaving sea, from the same root as heave, 'to lift'. The word for shelter grew out of a word for the water you were sheltering from.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *kap-

  2. Middle English

    havene

  3. English, today

    haven

From Middle English havene. From Middle English haven, havene, from Old English hæfen (“haven; harbour; port”), from Proto-West Germanic habanu, 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”)). a doublet of abra.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

haven in the wild

  • In some older definitions, a tax haven also offers financial secrecy.

    Tax haven

  • The use of tax havens results in a loss of tax revenues to countries that are not tax havens.

    Tax haven

  • By the use of such places as a haven, by extension the term has come to be used for any place of safety.

    Sanctuary

  • A safe haven is a place of safety or refuge.

    Safe haven (disambiguation)

  • Academics rank Ireland as the largest tax haven; larger than the Caribbean tax haven system.

    Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • tax haven