tan
Pluraltans
Pluraltans
- 1A darker skin color caused by exposure to sunlight or to a similar source of light.
He spent the whole week at the lake and came home with a deep tan.
Dermatologists warn that a tan is a sign of skin damage, not of good health.
UsageCommon in get a tan, have a tan and work on your tan.
Similarsuntan
- 2
- 3To turn light brown, or make the skin turn light brown, from exposure to the sun or to artificial ultraviolet light, as on a sunbed.
Fair-skinned people often burn rather than tan.
A week of sailing had tanned his face and arms.
UsageOften contrasted with burn: some people burn rather than tan.
Note
The sun sense borrows from the leather trade: late Old English tannian, from Medieval Latin tannare, meant "to tan a hide", and skin darkened by the sun came to be described the same way.
Checked 3 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- The sun-related verb derives from the leather-working verb, through late Old English tannian, meaning “to tan a hide”. en.wiktionary.org
- The Latin source tannare is Medieval Latin. en.wikipedia.org
- 4
- 5Having skin darkened by the sun or by an artificial process meant to imitate the sun's effect.
She came back from Florida looking tan and rested.
One session in the spray booth left her tanner than a week at the beach ever had.
UsageTan here is mainly North American; British English prefers tanned. The comparative is tanner.
Note
As an adjective, tan compares like other one-syllable adjectives, doubling the n: tanner, tannest. That comparative is spelled exactly like the word for someone who tans hides, so tanner than ever is about skin, not the trade.
- 6To make an animal hide into leather by treating it with tannin, chromium salts, or another tanning agent; also, to work as a tanner.
Some workshops still tan hides the old way, with oak bark instead of chrome salts.
Her family had tanned in the same riverside yard for three generations.
Note
In the workshop the verb takes the hide as its object, as in tan hides or tan a skin, but it also stands alone for the trade itself, so a family that tanned for generations worked as tanners. The traditional method soaked hides with oak bark, the source of the tannic acid that does the work.
Checked 30 Oct 2026 · 2 facts
- Traditional tanning soaked hides in liquor made using oak bark. gutenberg.org
- Oak bark supplied tannic acid used in traditional tanning. heritagecrafts.org.uk
Less common meanings
- 7The symbol for tangent, the trigonometric function.
The slope of the line equals tan θ, where θ is the angle it makes with the x-axis.
Unlike sin x and cos x, tan x is undefined wherever cos x equals zero.
Note
The symbol names the ratio of sine to cosine, so tan x is sin x divided by cos x, and in a right triangle it is the opposite side over the adjacent one. That ratio is why it serves as a slope, and why the graph breaks apart: wherever the cosine reaches zero, as at 90°, there is no value, and the curve splits into separate branches.
Checked 30 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- Tangent equals sine divided by cosine and, for an acute angle in a right triangle, the opposite side divided by the adjacent side. andrews.edu
- Tangent represents the slope of a line making the given angle with the positive horizontal axis. mathbooks.unl.edu
- Tangent is undefined wherever cosine is zero, including at 90°. learninglab.rmit.edu.au
- The tangent graph has separate branches divided by vertical asymptotes where cosine is zero. spot.pcc.edu
- 8To spank or beat someone.
Get down from that roof before I tan your hide!
His mother tanned him good when she found out he'd skipped school.
UsageOften tan your hide, mostly in threats.
Similarspank, thrash, beat, whip, wallop
Note
The threat borrows from the leather trade: to tan someone is to treat their skin like a hide, and the fuller form is tan your hide. It belongs to warnings more than to description, as when Aunt Polly lets Tom go out to play in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) on condition he gets back "some time in a week, or I'll tan you".
Checked 30 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- The beating sense uses a metaphor from leatherworking, with tan your hide as the fuller expression. api.pageplace.de
- Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. gutenberg.org
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was first published in 1876. qc.cuny.edu
- Aunt Polly permits Tom to play, warning him to return with the quoted words. gutenberg.org
- 9Oak bark, or the bark of other trees, used as a source of tannic acid.
In spring the bark was stripped from the felled oaks, dried and sold as tan.
The bark strippers sold their oak tan to the tannery, where it was ground and soaked with the hides.
Note
Here tan is a working material rather than a shade, measured and boiled like any other ingredient. John Hannett's bookbinding manual, Bibliopegia, tells the binder to boil an ounce of tan with as much nutgall in two pints of water until only a pint remains. It is the oak bark that gave the color its name.
Checked 30 Oct 2026 · 3 facts
- John Hannett wrote the bookbinding manual Bibliopegia, using the pseudonym John Andrews Arnett. epapers.bham.ac.uk
- Bibliopegia instructs the binder to boil one ounce each of tan and nutgall in two pints of water, reducing the liquid to one pint. upload.wikimedia.org
- The color name tan derives from a word for oak bark used in tanning leather. en.wikipedia.org
- 10A Chinese family name in its Hokkien spelling, common in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
- 11To shoot someone, killing them with a gun.
- 12An Armenian drink of yogurt mixed with water, similar to airan and doogh.
- 13The number two in an old counting system formerly used in northern England, especially Cumbria and parts of Yorkshire, for counting sheep and knitting stitches.
- 14In Cantonese contexts, a picul: a traditional Chinese and Southeast Asian unit of weight, about 60 kilograms in Hong Kong usage.
- 15A twig or a small, thin, flexible stick.
- 16A surname common in China, written 譚 (谭 in simplified characters) and romanized in Mandarin pinyin; it is a different name from the Hokkien surname Tan, written 陳.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of tan apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
Proto-Celtic *tannos, whose origin is uncertain, gave Gaulish *tannos ("green oak"), and this became Old French tan ("tanbark") and then Middle English tan. Compare Breton tann ("sessile oak"). One idea traces the Celtic word to Proto-Indo-European *(s)dʰonu ("fir"). If that is right, German Tanne ("fir") and Tann ("woods") are related, and perhaps also Ancient Greek θάμνος (thámnos, "thicket").
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 8 facts
- The origin of Proto-Celtic *tannos is uncertain. en.wiktionary.org
- Gaulish *tannos descends from Proto-Celtic *tannos. en.wiktionary.org
- Gaulish *tannos meant 'green oak'; it is the source of Old French tan ('tanbark'), borrowed into Middle English as tan. en.wiktionary.org
- Breton tann means 'sessile oak' and shares the Celtic ancestry. en.wiktionary.org
- A proposed etymology derives the Celtic word from Proto-Indo-European *(s)dʰonu ('fir'). en.wiktionary.org
- German Tanne means 'fir' and is related under the proposed Indo-European etymology. en.wiktionary.org
- German Tann means 'woods' and belongs to the same proposed family through Tanne. en.wiktionary.org
- Ancient Greek θάμνος (thámnos, 'thicket') has also been proposed as a possible cognate. en.wiktionary.org
Latin tannare passed into late Old English as tannian, a verb meaning "to tan a hide," and then into Middle English as tannen.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Latin tannare was borrowed into late Old English as tannian. en.wiktionary.org
- Old English tannian meant “to tan a hide.” en.wiktionary.org
- Old English tannian developed into Middle English tannen. en.wiktionary.org