fain
/feɪn
/archaic
adjective [with infinitive]
1Pleased or willing under the circumstances: the traveller was fain to proceed...
- He held out his hand watching me, but I fain to think that I would still question myself, pulled away.’
2Compelled by the circumstances; obliged: he was fain to acknowledge that the agreement was sacrosanct...
- This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two about the propriety of every person minding his own business.
- In Smith's Discourse of the Commonweal, a maker of caps is made to say: ‘I am fain to give my journeymen twopence in a day more than I was wont to do, and yet they say they cannot sufficiently live thereon.
- If you would grant but my request, I then most surely should be blest; But if you treat me with disdain, To hang myself I now would fain; Then pray consent and make me thine, To save from death your Valentine.
adverb
Gladly: I am weary and would fain get a little rest...
- I would fain be friends with you, for their sake.
- ‘Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully,’ he writes.
- There was something else which she would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the Doctor's [i.e. her stepfather's room], but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words.
Origin
Old English fægen 'happy, well pleased', of Germanic origin, from a base meaning 'rejoice'; related to fawn2.
Rhymes
- spacecraft
- space curve
- space debris
- space density
- space-dyed
- space elevator
- spacefarer
- spacefaring
- space fiction
- space-fictional
- space-filler
- space fleet
- space flight
- space flyer
- space frame
- spaceful
- space group
- space gun
- space-heated
- space heater
- space heating
- space helmet
- space-helmeted
- spacehopper
- space industry