A wen is a harmless swelling under the skin. A wen on the scalp, remove the wen, an old wen.
It is an old word for what medicine now calls a sebaceous or epidermoid cyst — a lump formed when a gland becomes blocked. They are common, painless and removed mainly for comfort or appearance. The word is archaic outside medical history. Note the great wen, William Cobbett's nineteenth-century name for London, meaning a swelling growing on the face of the country, which is the only place most readers now meet it.
1nounwenA harmless swelling under the skin.
“The wen had been there for about thirty years.”
wen is a skin swelling.
WEN → the end of a PEN
A soft bump under the skin, no bigger than the end of a pen. It sits there, it does not hurt, and it does nothing at all.
hooks ontopen
Old English wenn is Germanic and has relatives in Dutch and Low German. It has meant the same lump for a thousand years and was simply displaced by Latin medical vocabulary.
Proto-Germanic
*wanjaz
Old English
wenn
Middle English
wen
English, today
wen
Built from
From Middle English wen, wenne, from Old English wenn, wænn (“wen”), from Proto-Germanic wanjaz. Cognate with Dutch wen (“goiter”), Low German Ween (“wen”), dialectal German Wenne (“wen”), Danish van, væne.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA