Auburn

How to spell auburn

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce auburn

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does auburn mean?

1. adjectiveOf a reddish-brown colour, typically used to describe hair.
2. nounA reddish-brown colour, especially as a hair shade.

Auburn in a sentence

• adjective

  Her auburn hair caught the warm light of the autumn afternoon.

• noun

  The dye box listed the colour simply as auburn.

• adjective

  The salon recommended a rich auburn shade to cover her grey roots.

• noun

  Deep auburn suited her complexion better than the blonde she had tried.

Where does auburn come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This colour word has a surprising backstory: it comes from the Latin alburnus, meaning 'whitish' or 'off-white', which was built on albus, the ordinary Latin word for 'white' (the same root that gives us 'album' and 'albino'). It travelled into Middle English in the 1400s by way of the Old French alborne or auborne, where it described a pale yellowish or blondish colour. Over the following centuries the meaning drifted dramatically toward reddish-brown, the very opposite end of the spectrum. A large part of that shift came from spelling confusion: the word was often written as 'abrune' or 'abroun', which readers naturally associated with 'brown', and the sense settled on a warm reddish-brown ever after. That tangled history is exactly why the spelling looks so odd today, since the 'au' preserves the old French form while the meaning has nothing to do with white at all.

How the word is built

• auburn (from Latin alburnus 'whitish', from albus 'white'); a single unanalysable root in modern English