Other forms: panned, pans, panning, paned
A pan is the flat metal cooking container with a long handle. A frying pan, heat the pan, put it in the pan.
In British English pan covers both the frying kind and the deep saucepan; American English tends to reserve pan for the flat one and pot for the deep. Baking tins are called pans in America too. As a verb, to pan is to move a camera slowly sideways, and to pan a film is to review it savagely. Note out of the frying pan into the fire, and pan out, meaning to turn out well, from panning for gold.
1nounpanA flat metal cooking container with a long handle.
“The pan is too small for four eggs.”
Patterna frying / non-stick / heavy pan · in the pan · pan handle · pan-fried
synonyms: frying pan, skillet
2verbmoveTo move a camera slowly sideways.
“The camera pans across the whole square.”
3verbcriticiseTo criticise something severely.
“The play was panned by every paper in London.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
pan is a cooking container.
Also accepted in games: frying pan
PAN → the flat PAN people washed gold in
People looking for gold shook river water round a flat pan until only the gold was left in it: the same pan you cook an egg in.
hooks ontogold
Old English panne probably came from Latin patina, a shallow dish, borrowed early — before the Anglo-Saxons reached Britain. It is one of a small group of Latin kitchen words that arrived with Roman cooking rather than with Norman French.
Middle English
panne
English, today
pan
From Middle English panne. From Middle English panne, from Old English panne, from Proto-West Germanic pannā, from Proto-Germanic pannǭ. Further origin uncertain. Alois Walde firstly suggests that it might be from Latin panna, from Latin patina (“broad, shallow dish, pan, stewpan”), from Ancient Greek πατάνη (“kind of flat dish”), which is probably from qsb-grc -. But the sound shifting from /patina/ → /patna/ → /panna/ raises questions as -tn- to -nn- is rarely seen in Latin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA