Tan

How to spell tan

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tan

What does tan mean?

1. nounThe brown colour the skin takes on after exposure to the sun.
2. verbTo make or become brown through sun exposure, or to treat animal hide into leather.
3. adjectiveOf a warm, light brown colour like that of treated leather.

Tan in a sentence

• noun

  She came back from the beach with a deep tan.

• verb

  Fair skin does not tan easily and tends to burn instead.

• adjective

  He wore a pair of tan leather shoes with the grey suit.

• noun

  A week in the sun gave him a noticeable tan.

• verb

  Workers at the old mill used oak bark to tan the hides.

• adjective

  The sofa was upholstered in a soft tan fabric.

Where does tan come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word goes back to the Old English verb tannian, meaning to turn an animal hide into leather, and it sits alongside the Medieval Latin tannare with the same sense. Both are usually traced to tannum, a word for crushed oak bark, since the bark was steeped in water to make the liquor that cured the skins; that bark word itself may have come from a Celtic or Gaulish source. For centuries tan meant only this leather work, which is why a person who did the job became a tanner and the place became a tannery. The familiar sense of skin turning brown in the sun is surprisingly recent, emerging in the nineteenth century as the idea spread that the sun toughened and coloured the skin much as the liquor coloured the hide. From the colour of treated leather came the modern colour name tan, a warm light brown, and the spelling has stayed mercifully simple throughout.

How the word is built

• tan (single Old English root meaning to treat hide with bark; no prefix or suffix)