Alan definition

Etymology 1

Celtic name borne by early Breton saints, of disputed origin and meaning; brought to England by Normans. As an early name, perhaps connected with ail, ‘noble’. It may have been the name of a Celtic deity, the brother of Bran, Welsh Alawn, Celtic Alun, ‘harmony’.

Quotations

1951 translation by Nevill Coghill of: 13?? Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales: The Reeve's Tale:

He grabbed at Alan by his Adam's apple,

And Alan grabbed him back in furious grapple

And clenched his fist and bashed him on the nose.
1910 P. G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs, and Other Stories, BiblioBazaar, LLC 2008, ISBN 0554330679, page 24:

I could pose as an artist all right; so I took the studio. Also the name of Alan Beverley. My own is Bill Bates. I had often wondered what it would feel like to be called by some name like Alan Beverley or Cyril Trevelyan.

Etymology 2

From , from .

Proper noun

Memeber of a group of Sarmatian tribes, nomadic pastoralists of the 1st millennium AD who spoke an Eastern Iranian language derived from Scytho-Sarmatian and which in turn evolved into modern Ossetian.

Proper noun

, cognate to Alan.