wen1
/wɛn
/noun
1A boil or other swelling or growth on the skin, especially a sebaceous cyst.Throughout the sermon that morning, Inman sat staring at Ada's neck and listening as Monroe repeated four times the Emerson passage about warts and wens and decreasing forever....
- The make-up people excelled themselves with lots of dirty fingernails and a welter of warts, wens and rotten corpses.
- There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than me, and another with a wooden leg.
2 archaic A very large or overcrowded city: the great wen of London
Origin
Old English wen(n), of unknown origin; compare with Low German wehne 'tumour, wart'.
wen2
/wɛn/noun
Old-fashioned spelling of wynn.The modern English wine comes from Old English wn, pronounced like modern ‘wean’: that indeed was how Chaucer pronounced his wyn, but Shakespeare's pronunciation was closer to our own.