brown
Definitions
General English
- adjective with a colour like earth or wood
- adjective with skin made dark by the sun
- noun the eighth letter of the alphabet, between G and I
General Science
- adjective not produced from renewable sources
Food
- adjective Partially or wholly untreated e.g. brown rice, brown sugar
Slang
- noun the anus. In this sense the word is probably an abbreviation of brown eye.
- noun a ten pound note or an amount of £10, from the colour of the banknote
- noun a cigarette, almost invariably used in the plural form, presumably from the colour of the tobacco
- noun heroin
- symbolH
- noun heroin. This was the most popular term among British drug users in the 1950s and 1960s before being supplanted by smack, scag, brown etc.
Travel
- verb to make something brown
Cars & Driving
- abbreviation a letter on the sidewall of a tyre denoting the maximum speed for which it is designed (210 km/h or 130 mph).
Electronics
- symbol for magnetic field strength, magnetic field intensity, or magnetic intensity.
Military
- noun a type of blister agent.
Origin & History of “brown”
In Old English, brown meant, rather vaguely, ‘dark’; it does not seem to have become a definite colour word until the 13th century. It comes from west and north Germanic *brūnaz, which probably goes back ultimately to the same Indo-European source (*bheros) as bear, etymologically the ‘brown (that is, dark) animal’. An additional meaning of brown in Old and middle English, shared also by related words such as Old high German brūn, was ‘shining, glistening’, particularly as applied to weapons (it survives in fossilized form in the old ballad Cospatrick, recorded in 1802: ‘my bonny brown sword’); Old French took it over when it borrowed brun from Germanic, and it is the basis of the verb burnir ‘polish’, from which English gets burnish (14th c.). Another contribution made by French brun to English is the feminine diminutive form brunette (17th c.). An earlier Old French variant burnete had previously been borrowed by English in the 12th century as burnet, and since the 14th century has been applied to a genus of plants of the rose family. The term burnet moth is first recorded in 1842.
