# tan

Pronunciation: US say "TAN" /tæn/; UK

## Noun

1. A darker skin color caused by exposure to sunlight or to a similar source of light.
   - Simple: A darker color that skin gets from sunlight or from light like it.
   - _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._
4. A light brownish color.
   - Simple: A light brown color.
   - _The sofa is available in charcoal, cream and tan._
   - _She painted the living room a warm tan that matched the wooden floor._
9. Oak bark, or the bark of other trees, used as a source of tannic acid.
   - Simple: Bark from oak and other trees that tannic acid is taken from.
   - _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._

## Adjective

2. Of a yellowish-brown color.
   - Simple: Brown with some yellow in it.
   - _She parked behind a tan sedan with out-of-state plates._
   - _By August the grass on the hills had turned tan and dry._
5. Having skin darkened by the sun or by an artificial process meant to imitate the sun's effect.
   - Simple: Having skin that the sun, or something that copies the sun, has made darker.
   - _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._

## Verb

3. To turn light brown, or make the skin turn light brown, from exposure to the sun or to artificial ultraviolet light, as on a sunbed.
   - Simple: To go brown in the sun or under a tanning lamp, or to make your skin go brown that way.
   - _Fair-skinned people often burn rather than tan._
   - _A week of sailing had tanned his face and arms._
6. To make an animal hide into leather by treating it with tannin, chromium salts, or another tanning agent; also, to work as a tanner.
   - Simple: To turn animal skins into leather by soaking them in special substances, or to work making leather.
   - _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._
8. To spank or beat someone. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To spank or hit someone hard.
   - _Get down from that roof before I tan your hide!_
   - _His mother tanned him good when she found out he'd skipped school._

## Symbol

7. The symbol for tangent, the trigonometric function.
   - Simple: A short way to write tangent, a math function used with angles.
   - _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._

## Other meanings

- (proper noun) A Chinese family name in its Hokkien spelling, common in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
- (verb) To shoot someone, killing them with a gun.
- (noun) An Armenian drink of yogurt mixed with water, similar to airan and doogh.
- (numeral) The number two in an old counting system formerly used in northern England, especially Cumbria and parts of Yorkshire, for counting sheep and knitting stitches.
- (noun) In Cantonese contexts, a picul: a traditional Chinese and Southeast Asian unit of weight, about 60 kilograms in Hong Kong usage.
- (noun) A twig or a small, thin, flexible stick.
- (proper noun) A 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.

## Origin

**Meanings 1–2, 4–5, 9** — 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").
**Meanings 3, 6, 8** — Latin tannare passed into late Old English as tannian, a verb meaning "to tan a hide," and then into Middle English as tannen.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/tan (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).