Other forms: moaning, moans, moaned
To moan is to let out a long low sound with your mouth almost shut — someone in pain, someone too tired to speak, someone lying awake with toothache. The wind moans round the corner of the house on a bad night.
In everyday British speech, moan mostly means complain, and complain in the least impressive way: going on about the weather, the trains, the price of everything. Stop moaning. He's always moaning about his boss. It is a noun as well — have a good moan, a moan about the neighbours — and it stays informal, so it belongs in the kitchen rather than in a letter to the council. It takes about: you moan about something, to somebody.
1verbmoanTo make a long low sound of pain or unhappiness.~37%
“He moaned quietly and turned over in his sleep.”
synonyms: groan
2verbspeechTo complain, at length and about small things. Informal.~30%
“She moans about the trains every single morning.”
3nounspellA long low sound, or a spell of complaining.~33%
“There was a low moan from the room upstairs.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 57 sentences found in the wild and placed 33 of them on a sense (24 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
MOAN → the MOON
A round white moon over the yard, and one dog sitting under it with its head back. Its mouth opens and a long low sound comes out, and goes on, and on.
hooks ontomoon
Moan and mean are the same old word. Old English mān was a complaint, a lamentation, and it is read off mǣnan — to complain over, to grieve, to mourn — which is where mean comes from too. Behind both sits Proto-Germanic *mainō, opinion, what is on your mind. What you mean and what you moan about started out as one thing.
Proto-Germanic
*mainō — opinion; mind
Proto-West Germanic
*mainu
Old English
*mān
Middle English
mone
English, today
moan
Built from
From Middle English mone, mane, man, (also as mene), from Old English mān, mǣn (“complaint; lamentation”), from Proto-West Germanic mainu, from Proto-Germanic mainō (“opinion; mind”). Cognate with Old Frisian mēne (“opinion”), Old High German meina (“opinion”). Old English mān, mǣn is inferred from Old English mǣnan (“to complain over; grieve; mourn”). More at mean.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA