banns
/banz
/- This notice or banns must be read thrice in the church at intervals of at least one week.
- Print up invitations to a marriage, publish banns at a friendly church, have one or more brides or grooms and even eat wedding cake.
Phrases
forbid the banns
Origin
Middle English: plural of ban1.
ban from Old English:
In Old English this meant ‘to summon by popular proclamation’. The word is Germanic and also passed into French where it had the sense ‘proclamation, summons, banishment’. This lies behind abandon (Late Middle English) based on the Old French phrase a bandon ‘at one's disposal, under one's jurisdiction’; and banal (mid 18th century) which originally related to feudal service and meant ‘compulsory’. From this came a notion of ‘common to everyone’ and so ‘ordinary and everyday’. The marriage banns (Middle English) read in church also come from the sense ‘proclamation’. Bandit (late 16th century) comes from Italian bandito a ‘banned person’, and banish (Late Middle English) comes from the same root.
Rhymes
- well-doer
- well-doing
- well done
- well-dowered
- well drag
- well drain
- well-drained
- well-drawn
- well dressed
- well-dresser
- well dressing
- well-dried
- well drill
- well-drilled
- well driller
- well drilling
- well-driven
- well-dunged
- well earned
- well-edged
- well educated
- well-embodied
- well endowed
- well-engineered
- well enough