/bɹaʊn/, /bɹuːn/
OriginFrom Middle English Broun, originally a nickname for someone with brown hair or a dark complexion. In the United States, sometimes an anglicization and translation of German Braun. Doublet of Bruno and Braun.
- countable, uncountableA colour like that of chocolate or coffee.
“The browns and greens in this painting give it a nice woodsy feel.”
“He wore brown jeans for his birthday.”
- countableOne of the colour balls used in snooker, with a value of 4 points.
- uncountableBlack tar heroin.
- archaic, countable, slangA copper coin.
““To save a journey up the town, / A razor lent here for a brown: / But if you think the price too high, / I beg you won’t the razor try.””
“I know there are many persons — some who are themselves poor — who 'never turn a beggar from their door,' but always give them a few browns (halfpence) or some scran (broken victuals).”
“"We've not had any breakfast,—won't you toss us down a brown?"—
That's what they call a penny in the streets of London Town.”
- countable, uncountableA brown horse or other animal.
“[…] browns are the soberest, bays are the worst tempered, and chestnuts are the most foolish.”
- countable, uncountableAny of various nymphalid butterflies of subfamily Satyrinae (formerly the family Satyridae), such as those of the genera Heteronympha and Melanitis.
- countable, informal, uncountableA brown trout (Salmo trutta).
- countable, uncountableA mass of birds or animals that may be indiscriminately fired at.
“The temptation to have a shot into the brown was great. There was not a head there which was not a big one and the one by himself was not too easy a shot since it is always difficult to shoot when lyi”
“My anger mounted at this, I opened the courtyard door and raised my musket to fire into the brown; I had loaded it with small shot, and if it had gone off that would have been the death of us and the ”
- alt-ofAlternative letter-case form of brown (“person with a dark complexion”).
- Having a brown colour.
“But none of those brown dwarfs were speeding along on a trajectory that would carry them out of the galaxy like “runaway” hypervelocity stars observed by astronomers in the last two decades.”
- obsoleteGloomy.
- US, capitalized, sometimesLatino/Latin American
“Reminds me of the time they asked me and a group of other Latino, predominantly Mexican, friends for our passports when we tried to go to their [expletive] party a little over a year ago.[…]
The sadde”
- US, broadly, capitalized, sometimesof color.
- capitalized, sometimesSouth Asian or sometimes Middle Eastern or North African
“I think they sort of realized like, oh, we have Aasif who is a Muslim, an American, brown person, you know, who can sit on that fence between cultures and sort of talk about what it is--what this is f”
- capitalized, sometimesSoutheast Asian, Pacific Islander, or sometimes Native American
“I came to deeply embrace anti-racism in slow, sustained increments.
To do so, I had to embrace my own identity as a Brown person -- and understand my own complicity in white supremacy.[…]
I had grown ”
- Not green (environmentally irresponsible); anti-green (against environmental protection).
“Near-synonyms: nongreen, antigreen”
“Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain’s biggest retailers, are locked in a fierce battle to prove who is greener. Even BSkyB, the British satellite outpost of the distinctly brown Murdoch empire, has de”
- Canada, UK, US, alt-of, oftenAlternative letter-case form of brown (“of a dark complexion”).
- intransitiveTo become brown.
“Fry the onions until they brown.”
“The chicken was browning nicely, the skin beginning to crisp and take on the toasty tones of oiled wood.”
“Don't microwave your milk too long
It browns and bubbles over”
- transitiveTo cook something until it becomes brown.
“Pound an onion, warm a spoonful of ghee and throw in the onion, brown it slightly, add your curry stuff, brown this till it smells pleasantly, […]”
- intransitive, transitiveTo tan.
“Light-skinned people tend to brown when exposed to the sun.”
- transitiveTo make brown or dusky.
“A trembling twilight o'er the welkin moves, / Browns the dim void and darkens deep the groves.”
- transitiveTo give a bright brown colour to, as to gun barrels, by forming a thin coating of oxide on their surface.
“It is mixed uniformly with olive oil, and rubbed upon the iron slightly heated, which is afterwards exposed to the air, till the wished-for degree of browning is produced.”
- countableA surname.
“(The Browns gave the Obamas an ornate penholder made from the timber of a Victorian antislave ship.)”
“After 170 years this is the closest Auckland has come to having a brown mayor. Sure he's a Palagi. But his name is Brown, he's run Manukau for a long time and there's heaps of brown people there so he”
“In his cast of characters, you really see a disproportionate focus, I think, on Black women - on Kamala Harris, who he's insinuated only has her job today because of who she dated; to Judge Ketanji Br”
- countable, uncountableAn English and Scottish surname transferred from the nickname.
- countable, uncountableAn Irish surname of Anglo-Norman origin, a translation of de Brún.
- countable, uncountableAn unincorporated community in California; named for hotelier George Brown.
- countable, uncountableAn unincorporated community in Louisiana; named for landowner George W. Brown.
- countable, uncountableAn unincorporated community in Oklahoma; named for postmaster Robert H. Brown.
- countable, uncountableAn unincorporated community in West Virginia; named for early settler John Brown.
- countable, uncountableA ghost town in Nevada.
- countable, uncountableA number of townships in the United States, listed under Brown Township.
- countable, uncountableBrown University.
Formsbrowns(plural) · broon(alternative, Northumbria) · browner(comparative) · more brown(comparative) · brownest(superlative) · most brown(superlative) · browns(present, singular, third-person) · browning(participle, present) · browned(participle, past) · browned(past) · Browns(plural) · Browne(alternative) · Broun(alternative) · more Brown(comparative) · most Brown(superlative)
Source: Wiktionary