LEARN • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Learn

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/lərn/ Listen

verb

Learn v. t. (past & past part. learned or learnt; pres. part. learning)

To gain knowledge or information of; to ascertain by inquiry, study, or investigation; to receive instruction concerning; to fix in the mind; to acquire understanding of, or skill; as, to learn the way; to learn a lesson; to learn dancing; to learn to skate; to learn the violin; to learn the truth about something. "Learn to do well." "Now learn a parable of the fig tree."

To communicate knowledge to; to teach. (Obs.) "Hast thou not learned me how To make perfumes?" Note: Learn formerly had also the sense of teach, in accordance with the analogy of the French and other languages, and hence we find it with this sense in Shakespeare, Spenser, and other old writers. This usage has now passed away. To learn is to receive instruction, and to teach is to give instruction. He who is taught learns, not he who teaches.

Learn v. i. (past & past part. learned or learnt; pres. part. learning) To acquire knowledge or skill; to make progress in acquiring knowledge or skill; to receive information or instruction; as, this child learns quickly. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me."

To learn by heart. See By heart, under Heart.

To learn by rote, to memorize by repetition without exercise of the understanding.

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Etymology of 'Learn'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Learn" Quotes from Famous Books

... keep his balance, not to exceed the limits of the game, any more than at lawn tennis; even when the parts are inverted and a man's adversary is some precocious, curious, seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she has nothing to learn and nothing to experience, except the last chapter of love, one of those girls from whom may fate always preserve our sons, and whom a psychological novel writer ...

— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... delightful little dinner at St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French cuisine are not yet extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to roast—a saying worthy of the philosophic magistrate who, coming to America, under the impression that he was to be fed upon roots and raw meat, went back to France ...

— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... mouth of Fitzroy River, where I have also mentioned the extent of coast on which we found it, and given the limits of its indigenous empire, extending not quite over two degrees of latitude. The peculiar character of the tree I leave the reader to learn from the woodcuts annexed. ...

— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... years, that all the people of our country, North, South, East, and West, have been undergoing a salutary political schooling, learning lessons which might have been acquired from the experience of other people; but we had all become so wise in our own conceit that we would only learn by actual experience of our own. The people even of small and unimportant localities, North as well as South, had reasoned themselves into the belief that their opinions were superior to the aggregated interest of the whole nation. Half our territorial nation rebelled, ...

— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... course, how men out here somehow lose old names, old identities. It won't surprise you much to learn my name really isn't Cameron, as ...

— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

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