óan

þan is a graphemic form that combines the Old English letter thorn (þ) with the letters “an.” It is not a modern English word, but it appears in historical manuscripts and scholarly editions as a variant or scribal form in the contexts where thorn was still in use. Thorn commonly represented the sounds [θ] or [ð], depending on position and dialect, so a string like “þan” would typically be pronounced roughly as [θan] or [ðan] in a manuscript reading.

In the study of Old English, Old Norse, and early Icelandic texts, thorn can appear in many spellings and nonstandard forms due to limited standardization in medieval scribal practices. The sequence “þan” is sometimes encountered in marginal glosses or as a variant spelling for words such as then or than in critical editions or textual apparatuses. It is not treated as an independent lexeme in modern dictionaries but rather as part of the orthographic variety found in historical sources.

Orthography and encoding: the character thorn is encoded in Unicode as U+00FE (þ) and U+00DE for its uppercase form (Þ). The combination “þan” uses thorn plus the ASCII letters “a” and “n.” In modern texts, thorn was largely replaced by the digraph “th,” contributing to the disappearance of forms like “þan” in standard English.

See also: Thorn, Old English, Old Norse, Icelandic alphabet, medieval manuscript conventions.