Tanning

How to spell tanning

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tanning

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tanning mean?

1. nounThe process of darkening the skin through exposure to sunlight or ultraviolet lamps.
2. nounThe process of treating animal hides with chemicals to turn them into durable leather.

Tanning in a sentence

• She booked a tanning session at the salon before the wedding.

• The old tanning works by the river once supplied leather to the whole town.

• Doctors warn that excessive tanning raises the risk of skin damage.

• Vegetable tanning uses bark extracts rather than mineral salts.

Where does tanning come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'tan', which came into English from the Old English verb 'tannian', meaning 'to convert raw hide into leather'. That word is generally traced back to the Medieval Latin 'tannare' with the same meaning, built on 'tannum', a word for crushed oak bark, the substance whose tannins were rubbed into skins to preserve them. Many scholars suspect the term ultimately reaches back to a Celtic source for the oak, since Breton 'tann' meant 'oak', so the chain of borrowing is genuinely tangled and not fully certain. The familiar sense of skin going brown in the sun did not appear until the 1500s and 1600s, by analogy with leather turning brown during curing. The single 'n' of 'tan' doubles before the '-ing' because the verb ends in a single stressed vowel plus consonant, which is the spelling rule that produces the double 'n' learners sometimes drop.

How the word is built

• tan (to brown skin or cure hide)
• -n- (doubled consonant)
• -ing (present participle / gerund)