Brunette

How to spell brunette

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce brunette

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does brunette mean?

1. nounA person, especially a woman, who has brown or dark hair.
2. adjectiveHaving brown or dark hair.

Brunette in a sentence

• noun

  The photograph showed a tall brunette standing by the window.

• adjective

  Her brunette hair fell loosely over her shoulders.

• noun

  Once a natural brunette, she had recently dyed her hair red.

• adjective

  The salon specialises in colour for brunette clients.

Where does brunette come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes directly from French, where brunette is the feminine diminutive of brun, meaning 'brown'. The French brun in turn descends from a Germanic root that also gave English the ordinary colour word 'brown', so the two are distant cousins. The diminutive ending -ette literally signals a smaller or feminine version, so brunette began as a way of describing a woman with brown or dark hair, while the masculine counterpart brunet was sometimes used for a man. English adopted the term in the seventeenth century, keeping the French double-t and silent-feeling -ette ending that is the main spelling trap. The matching word 'blonde', also borrowed from French with its feminine -e, shows the same pattern of importing hair-colour vocabulary wholesale from French.

How the word is built

• brun (brown)
• -ette (French feminine diminutive suffix)