BAN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Ban

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/bæn/ Listen

noun

Ban n. A kind of fine muslin, made in the East Indies from the fiber of the banana leaf stalks.

Ban n.

1.

A public proclamation or edict; a public order or notice, mandatory or prohibitory; a summons by public proclamation.

2.

(Feudal & Mil.) A calling together of the king's (esp. the French king's) vassals for military service; also, the body of vassals thus assembled or summoned. In present usage, in France and Prussia, the most effective part of the population liable to military duty and not in the standing army.

3.

pl. Notice of a proposed marriage, proclaimed in church. See Banns (the common spelling in this sense).

4.

An interdiction, prohibition, or proscription. "Under ban to touch."

5.

A curse or anathema. "Hecate's ban."

6.

A pecuniary mulct or penalty laid upon a delinquent for offending against a ban; as, a mulct paid to a bishop by one guilty of sacrilege or other crimes.

Ban of the empire (German Hist.), an imperial interdict by which political rights and privileges, as those of a prince, city, or district, were taken away.

Ban n. An ancient title of the warden of the eastern marches of Hungary; now, a title of the viceroy of Croatia and Slavonia.

verb

Ban v. t. (past & past part. banned; pres. part. banning)

1.

To curse; to invoke evil upon.

2.

To forbid; to interdict.

Ban v. i. To curse; to swear. (Obs.)

See images of 'Ban'

Etymology of 'Ban'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ban" Quotes from Famous Books

... earth. There is hardly an undertaking, however slight, that can be begun without first consulting these wretched birds. Yet it is hardly to be wondered at, that all tribes should hold the birds to be little prophets of the jungle, dashing across man's path, at critical moments, to bless or to ban. In the deep jungle, which at high noon is as silent as "sunless retreats of the ocean," gay-plumaged birds are not sitting on every bough singing plaintive, melodious notes; such lovely pictures exist solely in the mind of the poet or of him who has never visited ...

— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness

... needed no more said thereof; and that if the men of Austin and we differed it was not the part of Christian men to make the difference wider, even as Owen and Aldhelm were wont to say. And at that he raved, and threatened to lay the heaviest ban of the Church on Owen, and on all who held with him, and so he was taken from my presence, and I have seen him no more. But he ...

— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... aristocrat would have exempted agriculture from the ban of labour;[170] and, if the man of free birth could still have toiled productively on his holding, his contempt for the rabble which supplied the wants of his richer fellow-citizens in the towns would have been justified on material, if not on moral, ...

— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... which the Battalion's steps were turned was Arras. Early in May the French came to relieve the 61st Division at St. Quentin. It was said, perhaps with little truth, that the ban which forbade our guns to shell that town in such manner as, from a purely military standpoint, it deserved, induced this re-arrangement of the front. Certainly the French had tried in April, before the German retreat ...

— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... ocus Pangur bAN cechtar nathar fria saindAN bith a menma sam fri SEILGG mu menma ...

— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

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