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own

Pronunciation: /əʊn/

The English word “own” has 19 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Belonging to; possessed; acquired and designated by; proper to; property of; titled to; held in one's name; under/using the name of. Often marks a possessive determiner as reflexive, referring back to the subject of the clause or sentence.
  2. Not shared.
  3. Peculiar, domestic.
  4. Not foreign.

verb

  1. To have rightful possession of (property, goods or capital); to have legal title to; to acquire a property or asset.
  2. To have recognized political sovereignty over a place, territory, as distinct from the ordinary connotation of property ownership.
  3. To defeat or embarrass; to overwhelm.
  4. To virtually or figuratively enslave.
  5. To defeat, dominate, or be above.
  6. To illicitly obtain administrative access to a computer system, thereby having full access to all the files thereon (including executables).
  7. To be very good.
  8. To admit, concede, grant, allow; not to deny.
  9. To acknowledge.
  10. To proudly acknowledge; to not be ashamed or embarrassed of.
  11. To take responsibility for.
  12. To recognise.
  13. To claim as one's own.
  14. To confess.

noun

  1. A crushing insult.

Etymology

From Middle English oun, owen, from Old English āgen (“own, proper, peculiar”), originally the past participle of āgan; from Proto-West Germanic *aigan (“own”), from Proto-Germanic *aiganaz (“own”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eyḱ- (“to have, possess”). Doublet of eigen-. Cognates Cognate with Scots ain, awin, awn, ayn (“own”), Saterland Frisian oain (“own”), West Frisian, Dutch, and German eigen…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.