Ealne

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. An Old English form of the adjective meaning all or entire, used for a masculine noun in the accusative case
2. The Old English adjective for whole or complete, appearing in its accusative masculine singular form
3. A medieval English inflection of the word meaning all, entire or the whole of something

Etymology: "Ealne" is an Old English word, and it survives today only in scholarly study of the language. It is the accusative singular masculine form of "eall," meaning "all" or "whole," and it appears in texts such as the poetry and prose of the period before the Norman Conquest, where it modifies a masculine noun in the object position of a sentence. Old English adjectives changed their endings to match the case, number and gender of the nouns they described, so "ealne" is a single form in a larger family that also included "eall," "ealle," "eallum" and others. The root "eall" traces back to Proto-Germanic, and cognates appear in Old Saxon, Old High German and Old Norse, so the word belongs to a widespread family of Germanic terms for totality. Modern English "all" is its direct descendant, reshaped over centuries of sound change, while the endings that once carried grammatical information have largely disappeared from the language.

Synonyms: entire, whole, complete, all

Antonyms: partial