lawn

Plurallawns

Formslawns, lawning, lawned

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   An area of ground, typically around a house, covered with grass that is kept closely mown.

   After weeks of rain, the lawn had grown thick and needed mowing.

   They reseeded the front lawn where the grass had died.

   Similargrass, turf, yard

   Note

   Behind the trim garden word lies a wilder one: laune, an Early Modern alteration of laund, "glade", from Old French lande, "heath, moor". The "woodland clearing" meaning keeps that older ground, and Joseph C. Lincoln's Mr. Pratt's Patients (1913) shows the two meeting: a path opens "into a big clear space like a lawn." It counts both ways: a lawn, or a stretch of lawn. The fabric lawn is a separate word, named for Laon.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   A thin, sheer fabric made from finely woven linen or cotton.

   The Victorian nightgown was sewn from delicate white lawn.

   Lawn drapes well and is favored for lightweight summer shirts.

   Note

   A fabric apparently named for a place: Laon, a French town known for its linen, whose Latin name Laudunum is Celtic. Lawn is plain-woven, lighter and sheerer than cambric. It often sits before another noun to name the material, as in Bram Stoker's 'lawn death robe' in Dracula (1897) or the 'sheer lawn handkerchief' in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939).

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To cover a piece of ground with grass in order to create a lawn.

   The landscapers will lawn the entire courtyard next spring.

   They decided to lawn the slope to stop the soil washing away.

   Similarturf, grass, sod

   Note

   A landscaper's verb with a picturesque pedigree. An Historical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Account of Kirkstall Abbey (1827) proposes 'lawning the area within' the ruined abbey and using ivy to conceal its deformities. The verb is transitive and regular: you lawn a courtyard or a slope, and the forms are lawns, lawning and lawned.

4. 4
   nouncountable or uncountableplural

   Pieces of fine linen or cotton fabric, especially the lengths used to make a bishop's sleeves.

   The bishop's lawn billowed at his wrists as he raised his hands in blessing.

   Each spring the cathedral replaced the bishop's lawn with newly woven cloth.

   Note

   Here the cloth comes to stand for an office. Used in the plural, lawns are the cut lengths of fabric, above all those sewn into the wide white sleeves of an Anglican bishop's rochet. From there, 'lawn sleeves' came to mean the episcopate itself, much as 'the cloth' can mean the clergy.

5. 5
   noundialectalhistoricalEnglandcountable or uncountable

   An open glade or clearing of ground lying between stretches of woodland.

   The hunting party paused at a grassy lawn ringed by ancient woodland.

   A small chapel stood on the lawn where the two forests met.

   Similarglade, clearing

   Note

   This word belongs to English landscape history and local speech, not to the modern garden. In present-day writing it is easily mistaken for the mown grass, so the surrounding woodland has to make the meaning clear. Behind it lies Middle English launde, from Old French lande, 'heath, moor', which goes back through Germanic or Gaulish to a root for 'land, heath'. That root describes open, uncultivated ground, not tended turf.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A continuous sheet of microbial growth across an agar plate, so dense that separate colonies can no longer be distinguished.

   The plate showed a confluent lawn rather than countable colonies.

   Technicians spread the sample evenly to grow a uniform lawn for the assay.

   Note

   A microbiologist's word for growth that has run together. Once colonies merge into a single sheet, they can no longer be counted or picked apart. Such a lawn is often the goal rather than a failure. Spread evenly across a plate, it is the background for antibiotic susceptibility tests and bacteriophage plaque assays, where clear zones show up against it. 'Confluent lawn' is the usual pairing.

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