Tanned

How to spell tanned

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tanned

What does tanned mean?

1. adjectiveHaving skin that has turned brown from exposure to the sun.
2. verbTreated an animal hide with tannin or chemicals to turn it into leather (past tense of tan).

Tanned in a sentence

• adjective

  After two weeks in Spain she came home looking deeply tanned.

• verb

  The workshop tanned the cowhide before cutting it into belts.

• adjective

  His tanned forearms showed that he worked outdoors most days.

• verb

  Craftsmen once tanned the skins in pits filled with oak bark.

Where does tanned come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word tan comes from the Old English tannian, meaning to turn an animal hide into leather, which most likely passed through Medieval Latin tannare. That Latin verb was built on tannum, the word for crushed oak bark, the substance whose tannins were soaked into raw hides to preserve them; the oak bark connection is probably Celtic in deeper origin. For centuries the word was strictly about leather work, and only later, around the 1500s, did it stretch to describe skin going brown in the sun, since sun and bark both darkened a surface. The familiar noun tannin, the bitter compound found in tea and wine, is a direct cousin from the same root. The spelling trap is simply the doubled n: because tan ends in a single consonant after a short vowel, that consonant doubles before the -ed ending, giving tanned rather than taned.

How the word is built

• tan (to brown the skin / convert hide to leather)
• -ned (past tense; the final n doubles after a short vowel)