dean
Pluraldeans
Pluraldeans
- 1A senior official in a college or university who heads a faculty or division or has another advisory or disciplinary role.
The new dean of the law school plans to hire ten more faculty members.
Students who break the honor code must meet with the dean of students.
- 2The most senior member of a group, often the one who has belonged to it longest.
As dean of the diplomatic corps, the ambassador welcomed the new envoys on behalf of his colleagues.
After forty years on the bench, she became the dean of the state's judges.
Similardoyen
Note
This sense lives mostly in fixed titles: the dean of the diplomatic corps is a country's most senior ambassador, and the dean of the House is the longest-serving member of a legislature. Rex Stout's The Next Witness (1955) stretches it to the senior operator on a switchboard. Its doublet is doyen: the same Latin decānus, reaching English a second time through modern French.
- 3A senior official or presiding officer in certain church bodies, especially a cleric who ranks below a bishop and heads a chapter of canons.
The dean of the cathedral presided over a meeting of the chapter to discuss repairs to the roof.
After twenty years as a parish priest, he was appointed dean at a service led by the bishop.
- 4To make a student go before the dean of their college or university.
The porters will dean anyone caught climbing over the college wall after midnight.
His tutor deaned him for missing three essays in a row.
Note
Oxford and Cambridge colleges use this informal verb; elsewhere it is rare. Unlike the verb for holding the post, it takes an object, and the object is the student: a tutor deans someone, and the student is deaned. Outside those universities, most speakers would simply say the student was sent to see the dean.
- 5Alternative form of dene.
The path drops steeply into the dean, where a burn runs under the trees.
Children from the village used to play by the water at the foot of the dean.
Note
Northumbrian place names keep this spelling of dene, the deep valley of a stream or rivulet. It goes with that northern valley meaning, not with the other sense of dene, a sand dune by the seashore. Away from place names, dene is the usual spelling for the word.
Less common meanings
- 6To hold the position of dean.
He deaned at two universities before becoming a college president.
Few professors want to dean for more than one term.
Note
The verb is rare and takes no object: someone deans at a college, or deaned there for years. Its forms are regular: deans, deaning, deaned. Because so few writers use it, it can stop a reader short; served as dean or was dean of the faculty says the same thing in any register without drawing attention to itself.
- 7A hill.
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Origin
From Middle English den, deen (“dean”), from Anglo-Norman deen and Old French deien (modern French doyen), from Latin decānus. It is a doublet of doyen.