Lawn

How to spell lawn

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lawn

What does lawn mean?

1. nounAn area of short, mown grass in a garden, park, or other outdoor space.

Lawn in a sentence

• He spent the whole Saturday morning mowing the lawn.

• The children played football on the back lawn until dusk.

Where does lawn come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from Middle English laund, meaning an open space in woodland or a glade, which English took from the Old French launde, a word for a forest clearing or heath. That Old French term is generally traced to a Gaulish or Celtic source, related to the same ancient root that gives us the Welsh llan, an enclosure, and the everyday English word land. Over time the final d was dropped in pronunciation and then in spelling, leaving the modern form lawn, and the sense narrowed from a wild grassy clearing to the deliberately mown, tended grass of a garden by the 1700s. A completely separate noun, lawn meaning a fine, sheer linen cloth, has a different story: it is thought to come from Laon, a city in northern France once known for producing such fabric. The grass sense is the common one today, and the silent dropped d is the reason the spelling looks so much simpler than its history.

How the word is built

• lawn (from Middle English laund: a forest glade or open grassy space)