Tawn

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Having a yellowish-brown colour similar to that of tanned skin or ripened oak leaves, an archaic and dialect form
2. Of a warm, sandy brown shade, like the colour that sun-browned skin or dry grass takes on
3. Describing a dull yellow-brown hue, the kind seen in weathered leather or sun-baked earth

Etymology: "Tawn" is a word many readers will not recognise, and its history is a tangle of two unrelated sources. The first is "tan", the familiar word for the brown colour a skin takes on in the sun, or for the pale brown of leather once it has been treated with tannin. Tawn is an alteration of that word, and the change was shaped by "tawny", the adjective for a yellowish-brown colour, which pulled the spelling and sense of the older word towards it. The second, entirely separate origin is "town". In some dialects the word has been pronounced and written as "tawn", so the same spelling can point back to a settlement as readily as to a colour. Keeping these two lines apart is the key to the word, since its meaning depends on which one a given writer had in mind.