Drawn

How to spell drawn

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drawn

What does drawn mean?

1. verbPast participle of draw: having been pulled, sketched, or extracted.
2. adjectiveLooking strained, pale, or exhausted, as a face pulled tight by stress or tiredness.

Drawn in a sentence

• verb

  The curtains had been drawn before the film started.

• adjective

  After the long shift her face looked pale and drawn.

• verb

  The cartoon was drawn entirely by hand over several weeks.

• adjective

  He seemed thin and drawn after weeks of poor sleep.

Where does drawn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Drawn is the past participle of the verb draw, which descends from the Old English verb dragan, meaning 'to drag, to pull, or to draw along'. That early sense was entirely physical: to haul a cart, pull a load, or trail something behind you. The same Germanic root gave us the closely related word 'drag', and you can still hear the family resemblance in the modern range of meanings. Over the centuries the idea of pulling broadened: a pencil pulled across paper produced a 'drawn' line, hence the sense of sketching, while a face pulled tight by exhaustion or stress became a 'drawn' expression. The unusual spelling, with -awn rather than the sound it makes, reflects an old English vowel and a now-silent consonant that survived in writing long after the pronunciation softened.

How the word is built

• draw (from Old English dragan: to drag, pull)
• -n (past participle suffix)