Browning

How to spell browning

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce browning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does browning mean?

1. verbThe action of cooking or becoming brown, usually through heat or oxidation.
2. nounA dark liquid or powder added to gravies and sauces to deepen their colour.

Browning in a sentence

• verb

  The chef started browning the onions before adding the stock.

• noun

  A few drops of gravy browning gave the sauce a rich colour.

• verb

  The apple slices kept browning on the cut surface.

• noun

  She kept a bottle of browning in the cupboard for roast dinners.

Where does browning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built directly on the everyday English colour term 'brown', which descends from the Old English 'brun', meaning dark or dusky and sometimes shining. That root has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch 'bruin' and the German 'braun', and the word originally carried a sense of gleaming or burnished surfaces as much as of a particular colour. The verb 'to brown', meaning to make or become brown, grew naturally from the adjective, and was firmly established by the late medieval period, especially in cooking where heat turns food a rich brown. Adding the regular '-ing' ending produces 'browning', used both as the action of turning brown and, in the kitchen, as a name for a dark liquid that colours gravies and sauces. The spelling is wholly transparent once you remember it is simply 'brown' plus '-ing', with no doubling of the final 'n' because the word ends in a vowel-plus-two-consonant cluster.

How the word is built

• brown (Old English brun: dark, dusky)
• -ing (verb/noun suffix)