The Emptying of Things
To *wane* is to diminish — to grow less, to hollow out, to move toward absence. The word descends in an unbroken line from Old English *wanian*, meaning to decrease or to become lacking, and before that from Proto-Germanic *\*wanōną*, built on the adjective *\*wanaz*: deficient, lacking, empty. Behind that reconstructed Germanic root sits the Proto-Indo-European root *\*h₁weh₂-*, carrying the same primal sense of emptiness, of something that ought to be present but is not.
The word entered Middle English as *wanen* with no loss of meaning. A candle wanes. A tide wanes. A king's power wanes. The moon wanes. The terminal image of the Anglo-Saxon elegy is almost always a form of waning — halls emptied, lords diminished, glory passing like a shadow across a hillside.
The Germanic Family: Want, Wanton, Vain
The root *\*wanaz* generated one of the more instructive clusters in the Germanic lexicon. Consider *want*: borrowed into Middle English from Old Norse *vanta* (to lack, to be without), but from the same Proto-Germanic stock. The semantic history of *want* is a lesson in how languages drift. When *want* entered English around the twelfth century, it meant *to lack* — to want for food was to be without food, not to desire it. Only gradually did the word shade toward desire, presumably because what one lacks is often what one desires. The original sense persists in fossil form: *to want for nothing* means to lack nothing, not to desire nothing. The word *wane* and the word *want* are, at their deepest level, the same word — both expressions of absence.
*Wanton* carries the same root further into moral territory. Old English *wantowen* is a compound: *wan-* (the deficiency prefix, from *\*wanaz*) joined to *towen*, the past participle of *teon* — to draw, to lead, to discipline. A *wanton* person is one who has been *lacking in discipline*, not drawn toward virtue, unrestrained. The word began as a description of an undisciplined child and broadened outward into licentiousness. The etymological logic is precise: wanton conduct is conduct from which the guiding hand has been withdrawn, leaving only vacancy where there should have been form.
Latin Cognate: Vanus
The Indo-European root also reached Latin as *vanus* — empty, hollow, without substance. The connection is not borrowed but inherited: both Germanic *\*wanaz* and Latin *vanus* are reflexes of the same ancestral emptiness. From *vanus* English received *vain* (empty of real worth), *vanish* (to become empty of presence, to disappear), and *vaunt* (to make much of what is in fact hollow). *Vanity* in the biblical sense means precisely this: *vanitas*, the state of being *vanus* — not mere conceit but radical emptiness.
So *wane* and *vain* are cousins. When the Preacher says that all is vanity, and when the Anglo-Saxon poet watches a kingdom wane, they are reaching for the same root.
Wax and Wane
The pairing *wax and wane* is among the oldest collocations in the Germanic record. *Wax* derives from Old English *weaxan* — to grow, to increase — itself from Proto-Germanic *\*wahsijaną*. The pairing is antithetical: one root means addition, the other subtraction. Together they described the alternation of the world — tides, seasons, the health of kings, the size of kingdoms.
For the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse, the moon was the primary clock. The waxing moon (*weaxende mōna*) measured the first half of the month; the waning moon (*waniende mōna*) measured the second. Germanic calendar reckoning was lunar before it was solar, and *wane* is embedded in that older, darker system of time — counting backward from fullness toward the new dark.
The Elegiac Voice
Old English poetry returns to *wanian* as though drawn by gravity. In the elegies — *The Wanderer*, *The Seafarer*, *The Ruin* — the verb clusters around the decline of what was once great. Kingdoms wane. The company of thanes disperses. Stone walls, the work of giants according to the poets, stand roofless and moss-covered. The joy of the mead-hall wanes until it is a memory only, and the memory itself begins to wane.
The Word Today
*Wane* survives in modern English almost exclusively in set phrases — the waning moon, on the wane — but it carries its full etymological weight: absence dressed as decline, the hollow that follows after fullness. Behind it stand want, wanton, vain, vanish, vaunt, and the Latin *vanus*: an entire vocabulary of emptiness, all rising from the same Indo-European perception that the world moves between presence and absence, and that absence has its own precise name.