''mien'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260718130800-00-⌔

mien - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

mien (countable and uncountable, plural miens)

• (countable, uncountable) Demeanor; facial expression or attitude, especially one which is intended by its bearer.
  • ✤ Gentlest Guardians marked serene/His early hope, his liberal mien; […]¹
  • ✤ Beauty, like all divine gifts, is everywhere to be seen by the eye of the faithful admirer of nature; and, like all spirits, she is scarcely to be described by words. Her countenance and mien, her path, her hue and carriage, often surpass expression, and soothe the enthusiast into reverie and silence.²
  • ✤ Jenny’s coming o’er the green,/Fairer form was never seen,/Winning is her gentle mien;/Why do I love her so?³
  • ✤ [T]aking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.⁴
  • ✤ Although still young at heart and head, he looks more and more like his old friend Archimedes, increasingly bearded and increasingly grey, with an otherworldly mien – a look that should earn him a spot in the online quiz featuring portraits of frumpy old men under the rubric “Prof or Hobo?”⁵
• (countable) A specific facial expression.
  • ✤ It’s hard to say which is worse: the press-on smiles favored by many a ballet dancer, or the stony “I’m going to pretend this isn’t happening to me” miens often found in contemporary troupes like White Road.⁶

Etymology

From French mine (“appearance”) (whence also Danish mine and German Miene), perhaps from Breton min (“face of an animal”), or from Latin minio (“to redden”).⁷

Pronunciation

• IPA: /miːn/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Rhymes: -iːn
• Homophones: mean, mesne

Printed 2026-07-18.

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Footnotes

1. 1847, R[alph] W[aldo] Emerson, “Threnody”, in Poems, Boston, Mass.: James Munroe and Company, →OCLC, page 238: ↩

2. 1856, Joseph Turnley, The Language of the Eye, →OCLC, page 111: ↩

3. 1860, Stephen Foster, “Jenny’s coming o’er the green”‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

4. 1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Incident at the Window”, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 63: ↩

5. 2015 July 23, Siobhan Roberts, “John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

6. 2007 February 10, Claudia La Rocco, “Stony Miens and Sad Hearts”, in New York Times ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩

7. Le Robert pour tous, Dictionnaire de la langue française, Janvier 2004, p. 727, mine1 ↩