fen
1 Americannoun
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low land covered wholly or partially with water; boggy land; a marsh.
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the Fens, a marshy region W and S of The Wash, in E England.
noun
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fen
plural
noun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of fen1
before 900; Middle English, Old English; cognate with Old Norse fen quagmire, Gothic fani mud, Dutch ven, German Fenn fen, bog
Origin of fen2
First recorded in 1905–10, fen is from the Chinese word fēn
Explanation
A fen is a marshy area — a damp, grassy area of ground. If your entire back yard is a fen, you'll want to wear tall rubber boots when you walk your dog. A fen is similar to a marsh, a mire, a swamp, or a bog. In all of these wetland ecosystems, the water level tends to rise and fall, leaving them constantly soggy to some degree. Fens are distinguished by the kinds of plants that grow there, including tall grasses and moss, and by the acidity of the water. The word fen comes from the Old English fenn, which means "mud, mire, dirt, or marsh."
Vocabulary lists containing fen
Beowulf
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Beowulf: A New Telling
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Essential Three-Letter Words, Part 3
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
This enchantment was captured by a 24-year-old Virginia Woolf, who visited an English fen and its surroundings in 1906, and described the area as a “strange, gray-green, undulating, dreaming, philosophizing and remembering land.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026
The fen, which is an area of low, flat, wet land, is monitored by Natur am Byth's Llŷn and Ynys Môn project, which aims to protect some of north Wales' most at risk species.
From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2026
We stop at a popular shop, newly under a roof, for cheung fen, rice-flour rolls dressed in sesame, soy, and chile, and eat standing up, like before.
From Salon ● Aug. 9, 2026
The council said contractors would use machinery with wide tracks to reduce damage from them to the area of wildflower grassland, marshy fen and wet woodland.
From BBC ● Apr. 29, 2026
It stood tall and firm on the edge of the misty fen.
From "Beowulf: A New Telling" by Robert Nye
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
