yen

n.
A strong desire or inclination; a yearning or craving.

intr.v., yenned, yen·ning, yens.
To have a strong desire or inclination; yearn.

[Chinese (Cantonese) uên, hope, wish, equivalent to Chinese (Mandarin) yuàn.]

noun

A strong wanting of what promises enjoyment or pleasure: appetence, appetency, appetite, craving, desire, hunger, itch, longing, lust, thirst, wish, yearning. See desire.

n

Definition: strong want
Antonyms: dislike, hate, hatred

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from Cantonese Chinese
This word originated in China

If you have a yen, you may have a unit of Japanese currency equivalent to a hundred sen and worth about one 130th of a dollar. Or you may just have a craving, in which case your word is not Japanese at all, but Chinese of the Cantonese variety.

Nowadays in English our yens are mild, compared to desires and cravings, and they are generally directed to benevolent ends; but when we first got the word, in 1876, a yen was specifically a desire for opium. A book on China published that year explained that a person will "ask if an opium-smoker has the yin or not, meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his doses of opium until he has established a craving for the drug." But English speakers soon began to yen more widely, and today in English you can have a yen for anything, from gambling to horticulture, from exercise to classical music. In 1961, for example, Time magazine even discussed "the yen of Christian churchmen for achieving church unity."

In numbers of speakers, Cantonese or Yue is one of the second-rank dialects of Chinese, having a mere fifty million or so. That compares with more than seven hundred million for Mandarin, the dominant dialect. But Cantonese is the form of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, where it has interacted with speakers of English for more than 150 years; Cantonese is also the variety spoken by the majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States, so it has had a disproportionate influence on English.

Thus it is, also, that Chinese cooking in America has a Cantonese accent with words like kumquat (1699), chop suey (1888), chow mein (1903), won ton (1934), bok choy (1938), subgum (1938), dim sum (1948), and wok (1952). Other English words from Cantonese include sampan (boat, 1620), typhoon (1771), tong (secret society, 1883), cheongsam (dress with slit skirt, 1952), and shar-pei (dog, 1975).

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yen vi	yen vy