Definition of "plain" in Englisch

adjective

1. (now rare, regional) Flat, level.

2. Simple, unaltered.

3. Obvious.

4. Open.

5. Not unusually beautiful; unattractive.

   • Throughout high school she worried that she had a rather plain face.

6. (card games) Not a trump.

adverb

1. (colloquial) Simply.

   • It was just plain stupid.
   • I plain forgot.

2. (archaic) Plainly; distinctly.

   • Tell me plain: do you love me or no?

noun

1. An expanse of land with relatively low relief and few trees, especially a grassy expanse.

   • 1961, J. A. Philip. Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato. In: Proceedings and Transactions of the American Philological Association 92. p. 467. For Plato the life of the philosopher is a life of struggle towards the goal of knowledge, towards “searching the heavens and measuring the plains, in all places seeking the nature of everything as a whole”

2. A broad, flat expanse in general, as of water.

3. (archaic) Synonym of field in reference to a battlefield.

4. (obsolete) Alternative spelling of plane: a flat geometric field.

verb

1. (obsolete, transitive) To level; to raze; to make plain or even on the surface.

   • We would rake Europe rather, plain the East;

2. (obsolete, transitive) To make plain or manifest; to explain.

noun

1. (rare, poetic) A lamentation.

verb

1. (reflexive, obsolete) To complain.

2. (ambitransitive, now rare, poetic) To lament, bewail.

   • to plain a loss
   • Then came I crying, and to-day, / With heavier cause to plain, / Depart I into death away, / Not to be born again.

adjective

1. (obsolete) Full, complete in number or extent.