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dun

Pronunciation: /dʌn/

The English word “dun” has 13 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A brownish grey colour.
  2. A collector of debts, especially one who is insistent and demanding.
  3. An urgent request or demand of payment.
  4. A newly hatched, immature mayfly; a mayfly subimago.
  5. A fly made to resemble the mayfly subimago.
  6. An ancient or medieval fortification; especially a hill-fort in Scotland or Ireland.
  7. A structure in the Orkney or Shetland islands or in Scotland consisting of a roundhouse surrounded by a circular wall; a broch.
  8. A mound or small hill.

adjective

  1. Of a brownish grey colour.

verb

  1. To ask or beset a debtor for payment.
  2. To harass by continually repeating e.g. a request.
  3. To cure, as codfish, by laying them, after salting, in a pile in a dark place, covered with saltgrass or a similar substance.

interjection

  1. Imitating a deep bass note, such as that found in suspenseful music.

Etymology

From Middle English dun, donn, dunne, from Old English dunn (“dun, dingy brown, bark-colored, brownish black”), from Proto-West Germanic *duʀn, from Proto-Germanic *duznaz, *dusnaz (“brown, yellow”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂- (“to smoke, raise dust”). Cognate with Old Saxon dun (“brown, dark”), Old High German tusin (“ash-gray, dull brown, pale yellow, dark”), Old Norse dunna (“female…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.