ban

Meanings

Verb

• To summon; to call out.
• To anathematize; to pronounce an ecclesiastical curse upon; to place under a ban.
• To curse; to execrate.
• To prohibit; to interdict; to proscribe; to forbid or block from participation.
• To curse; to utter curses or maledictions.

Noun

• Prohibition.
• A public proclamation or edict; a summons by public proclamation. Chiefly, in early use, a summons to arms.
• The gathering of the (French) king's vassals for war; the whole body of vassals so assembled, or liable to be summoned; originally, the same as arrière-ban: in the 16th c., French usage created a distinction between ban and arrière-ban, for which see the latter word.
• A curse or anathema.
• A pecuniary mulct or penalty laid upon a delinquent for offending against a ban, such as a mulct paid to a bishop by one guilty of sacrilege or other crimes.
• A subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Romanian leu.
• A subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Moldovan leu.
• A unit measuring information or entropy based on base-ten logarithms, rather than the base-two logarithms that define the bit.
• A title used in several states in central and south-eastern Europe between the 7th century and the 20th century.

Related

Similar words

• forbid
• prohibit
• disallow
• dit, hartley

Origin

• From Middle English bannen ("to summon; to banish; to curse"), partly from Old English bannan ("to summon, command, proclaim, call out") and partly from Old Norse banna ("to prohibit; to curse"), both from Proto-Germanic *bannaną ("to proclaim, to order; to summon; to ban; to curse, forbid"), from Proto-Indo-European, innovative nasal-infixed zero-grade athematic present of *bʰeh₂-.
• Cognate with Dutch bannen ("to ban, exile, discard"), German bannen ("to exile, to exorcise, captivate, excommunicate"), Swedish banna ("to ban, scold"), , Armenian բան and perhaps Albanian banoj ("to reside, dwell"). See also banal, abandon.
• Borrowed from Romanian ban of uncertain origin, perhaps from Serbo-Croatian ban.
• From Banburismus; coined by Alan Turing.
• From (compare Serbo-Croatian ban), from Proto-Slavic *banъ; see there for more.