TAWNY

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does tawny mean? 

• TAWNY (adjective)
  The adjective TAWNY has 1 sense:

1. of a light brown to brownish orange color; the color of tanned leather

  Familiarity information: TAWNY used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TAWNY (adjective)

Comparative: tawnier   
Superlative: tawniest   

Sense 1

Meaning:

Of a light brown to brownish orange color; the color of tanned leather

Synonyms:

tawny; tawny-brown

Similar:

chromatic (being or having or characterized by hue)

Derivation:

tawniness (the quality or state of being the color of tanned leather)

 Context examples 

A short, fairly hard coat of hair covers the body and comes in black and tan, liver and tan, and red and tawny.

(Bloodhound, NCI Thesaurus)

It was a giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging jowl, black muzzle, and huge projecting bones.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He sniffed the sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his thoughts whirling on from the particular to the universal.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Here and there a tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood and lost itself again in the ferns and brambles upon the further side.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Briards are generally black, gray, or tawny and have a shaggy beard, eyebrows and mustache.

(Briard, NCI Thesaurus)

In the near distance, in contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland pastures.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

By nature he must have been a fair-skinned man, for his upper brow, where his cap came over it, was as white as mine, and his close-cropped hair was tawny.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

His eye, as I have often said, was a black eye: it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody light in its gloom; and his face flushed—olive cheek and hueless forehead received a glow as from spreading, ascending heart-fire: and he stirred, lifted his strong arm—he could have struck Mason, dashed him on the church-floor, shocked by ruthless blow the breath from his body—but Mason shrank away, and cried faintly, Good God!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves, and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

Once a dark, clumsy tapir stared at us from a gap in the bushes, and then lumbered away through the forest; once, too, the yellow, sinuous form of a great puma whisked amid the brushwood, and its green, baleful eyes glared hatred at us over its tawny shoulder.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)