Noun

(en noun)

(obsolete) A weathercock, a weather vane.

* 1801 , John Baillie, An Impartial History of the Town and County of Newcastle Upon Tyne , page 541,

The ?teeple had become old and ruinous; and therefore the pre?ent one was built about the year 1740. It had, at that time, four fanes' mounted on ?pires, on the four corners; the?e being judged too weak for the ' fanes , were taken down in 1764, and the roof of the ?teeple altered.

Noun

(en noun)

A temple or sacred place.

* 1850 , The Madras Journal of Literature and Science , Volume 16, page 64,

Fanes are built around it for a distance of 3, 4 or 5 Indian miles; but whether these are Jaina , or more strictly Hindu is not mentioned.

* 1884 , , Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau , page 78,

The priests of the Germans and Britons were druids. They had their sacred oaken groves. Such were their steeple houses. Nature was to some extent a fane to them.

*, chapter=5

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great organ, the clustered lights, […], the height and vastness of this noble fane , its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts.}}

* 1993 [1978], (editor), The Secret Doctrine , Volume 1: Cosmogenesis, page 458,

And this ideal conception is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, however coarse and grotesque, in the crowded galleries of the sombre fanes of India and other Mother lands of cults.