yawn

Formsyawns, yawning, yawned

Pluralyawns

1. 1
   verbintransitive

   To open the mouth wide and take a long, deep breath, often from tiredness or boredom, sometimes together with a stretch.

   He tried not to yawn during the long staff meeting.

   The children yawned through the final hour of the car trip.

   Note

   The bodily act at the root of every other sense: Old English ġeonian meant both "to yawn" and "to gape", so the wide opening of the chasm sense was there from the start. The stretch that often comes with it has its own name, pandiculation. The present participle readily works as an adjective, as in John Trumbull's line about "the yawning audience" nodding beneath a dull speaker.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An instance of opening the mouth wide and drawing a long, deep breath, usually because of tiredness or boredom.

   A sudden yawn interrupted her answer during the interview.

   He stifled a yawn as the professor droned on.

   Note

   A countable event, one yawn at a time, and it comes with its own verbs. In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice a bored reader gives "a great yawn" and then pretends to be enjoying herself. In Conrad's Typhoon (1902) Mrs. MacWhirr stifles one even when alone. The stifled yawn is the polite version, swallowed to hide boredom or fatigue.

3. 3
   verbintransitive

   To form or present a wide, deep opening; to gape open.

   A vast chasm yawned where the road had collapsed.

   Deep ravines yawn between the mountain peaks.

   Similargape, open

   Note

   Here the open mouth belongs to the landscape: chasms, graves and hell itself gape wide. Shakespeare's churchyards yawn in Hamlet, and in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) Hell, "yawning," receives the fallen whole. Today the sense is most at home as a participle before a noun, as in a yawning abyss. It still carries the menace of the word's gaping Old English root.

4. 4
   nouncolloquialcountable

   An event or occasion so dull that it bores everyone present.

   Critics called the sequel a complete yawn.

   The conference turned out to be a yawn, with one flat speaker after another.

   Similarbore, drag, snooze

   Oppositethrill

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To utter words while in the act of yawning.

   "I think I'll turn in," he yawned, rubbing his eyes.

   Half asleep, the children yawn their answers during the early class.

   Note

   A speech verb borrowed from the body. It tags a line of dialogue the way said or sighed does, and the words come out stretched by the yawn. It almost always follows or interrupts the quoted words, and it suits weary or bored speakers. Stephen McKenna's The Secret Victory (1922) and Andrew Holleran's The Dancer from the Dance (1978) both use it this way, in the middle of a novel's dialogue.

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