Brown

How to spell brown

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brown

What does brown mean?

1. adjectiveOf a colour produced by mixing red, yellow, and black, like that of wood, soil, or coffee.
2. verbTo cook or heat food until its surface turns a brown colour.

Brown in a sentence

• adjective

  She painted the fence a deep brown to match the shed.

• verb

  Sear the meat first to brown the outside before adding the stock.

• adjective

  His old leather jacket had faded to a dusty brown.

• verb

  You need a hot pan to brown the onions properly.

Where does brown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Brown descends from the Old English brun, an adjective that named a dark, dusky, or reddish-dark colour. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins in Dutch bruin, German braun, and Old Norse brunn, all going back to a prehistoric Germanic root that may also have carried a sense of shining or polished, which is why old poetic English sometimes used it of gleaming swords as well as of colour. The everyday colour sense was already firmly established by the medieval period, and the word has stayed remarkably stable in both sound and spelling ever since. Because it is so old and so common, the spelling is phonetic and untroublesome: the only thing to remember is the 'ow' sound is written 'ow', not 'au' or 'ou'. The word also lent itself early to surnames and place names, and the verb sense of cooking food until it turns this colour grew naturally out of the adjective.

How the word is built

• brown (a single native root word; no prefix or suffix, from Old English brun)