Other forms: yawning, yawns, yawned
A yawn is opening your mouth wide and slowly because you are tired or bored. In and then out, and your eyes water.
Nobody is entirely sure why we do it, though cooling the brain is the current best guess. What is certain is that it is contagious, and reading about yawning is often enough to start one. The word works as a verb and a noun. It has a dismissive figurative use, since calling a film a yawn means it was boring, and a gap can yawn open, meaning to gape wide.
Yawn has always been a gape. Old English ġinian meant to yawn or to gape, from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning exactly that, which is why a gap in a cliff can yawn as well.
Proto-Germanic
*ginōną — to yawn
Proto-West Germanic
*ginōn
Old English
ġinian
Middle English
yanen
English, today
yawn
Built from
Partly from Middle English yanen, yonen, yenen (“to yawn”), from Old English ġinian, ġinian (“to yawn, gape”), from Proto-West Germanic ginōn, from Proto-Germanic ginōną (“to yawn”); and partly from Middle English gonen (“to gape, yawn”), from Old English gānian (“to yawn, gape”), from Proto-West Germanic gainōn, from Proto-Germanic gainōną (“to yawn, gape”); both from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰi-, ǵʰeyh₁- (“to yawn, gape”). Cognate with frr jåne (“to yawn”), stq jaanje, joanje (“to yawn”), Middle Dutch genen, ghenen (“to yawn”), German Low German jahnen (“to yawn”), German gähnen (“to yawn, gape”), dialectal Swedish gana (“to gape, gawk”), dialectal Norwegian gina (“to gape”). Compare also cu зѣѭ (Russian зи́нуть, зия́ть), Greek χαίνω), Latin hiō, xto śew, txb kāy-, Lithuanian žioti, Sanskrit जेह्
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Body & Health, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 21 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word