wean1
/wiːn
/verb [with object]
1Accustom (an infant or other young mammal) to food other than its mother’s milk.A breast-feeding mother will wean her infant before returning to work....
- There were seventeen children in all, one a very young infant not even weaned from his mother's milk, yet.
- Sperm whale mothers wean their calves on pieces of squid.
1.1 (often wean someone off) Accustom (someone) to managing without something which they have become dependent on: the doctor tried to wean her off the sleeping pills...
- Like all sorts of dependency we need to wean people off their cars, but at the same time we cannot leave people high and dry.
- The patient dies 71 days later as doctors try to wean him from a ventilator.
- She said she felt she had no support when trying to wean people off the drug, which is used for the short-term relief of anxiety.
1.2 (be weaned on) Be strongly influenced by (something), especially from an early age: I was weaned on a regular diet of Hollywood fantasy...
- The easy availability of alcohol means that kids and teenagers are at risk of being weaned on to alcohol at an early stage.
- McLaughlin says that he can't explain why, but he often feels a need to revisit his past, and classic American songbook material was what he was weaned on as a young jazz player in the '60s.
- Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Carl Stalling wrote the music for the classic Warner Brothers cartoons that John Zorn was weaned on.
Origin
Old English wenian, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch wennen and German entwöhnen.
Rhymes
wean2
/wiːn/noun Scottish & Northern English
A young child.‘My daughter goes to a fairly hard-core working-class school and every morning, I see guys kissing their weans, telling them how much they love them, and sending them on their way,’ says Mullan....
- ‘It was a different matter when Jack Steedman had loads of weans going unpaid from door to door in Clydebank selling bingo tickets to raise funds,’ says Robertson.
- ‘It's magic,’ is all the explanation weans require.
Origin
Late 17th century: contraction of wee ane 'little one'.