1 a CHESS piece of the smallest size and least value. Each player has eight pawns at the start of a game:
He had to sacrifice another pawn.
2 a person or group whose actions are controlled by more powerful people:
The hostages are being used as political pawns.
IDIOMS
in pawn if sth is in pawn, it has been pawned:
All her jewellery was in pawn.
verb [VN] to leave an object with a pawnbroker in exchange for money. The object is returned to the owner if he or she pays back the money within an agreed period of time. If not, it can be sold.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for pawn is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is pawn a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, pawn is tagged as noun.
Does pawn appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — pawn appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
