Legal Writing

What Color is ?Wan??

By Maeve Maddox

My first encounter with the word wan [w?n)] was in the first stanza of this poem by Sir John Suckling (1609-1642):

Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can?t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?

I assumed that wan must be a synonym for pale, and I thought of pale as meaning ?whitish? or ?ashen.?

Many years later, I read this line about the approach of Grendel in Beowulf:

Com on wanre niht scriğan sceadugenga. (line 702)

Donaldson translates wanre (wan) as ?black?:

There came gliding in the black night the walker in darkness.

The literal translation is:

Came in dark night to glide the shadow-goer.

From meaning such things as ?dark/lacking light,/gloomy? in Old English, wan now means

Pallid, faded, sickly; unusually or unhealthily pale. Most frequently applied to the human face. (OED)

A wan smile is ?a faint or forced smile (as of one sick or unhappy).?

The adverb wanly is still used to describe a sickly or pathetic smile:

she smiled wanly at the doctor

I finished the scene and smiled wanly at the casting director.

. . . she didn’t want to deflate the delight the stranger was obviously taking in his trick, so she smiled wanly, patiently waiting

The Oxford American Writer?s Thesaurus (2008) gives these synonyms for wan:
pale
pallid
ashen
white
gray
anemic
colorless
bloodless
waxen
chalky
pasty
peaked [p?'k?d]
sickly
washed out
drained
drawn
ghostly

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on March 28, 2010 (boomark / email).