A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
tawny
Tawny is a warm light brown with orange or yellow in it, the color of a lion, of dried grass, and of the bird that carries it in its name. It is a standard descriptive term in ornithology and appears in the tawny owl, tawny eagle, tawny frogmouth, and tawny pipit, in every case for a mottled brown that is warmer than plain brown and duller than rust.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French in the fourteenth century, from a verb meaning to tan, so a tawny thing is the color of tanned leather. That verb comes from the same root as tan and tannin, which trace back to a word for oak bark, since oak bark is what leather was tanned with.
Notes
The tawny owl is the owl of the classic hooting call and the one that answers itself: The long quavering hoot is the male and the sharp kewick is the female, so the familiar sound is a conversation rather than one bird. It has the softest-edged feathers of any British owl and hunts in near silence, and its eyes gather enough light that it can hunt on a night when a human can see nothing at all.