autumn

name

1. A female given name from English of modern usage, from autumn, the name of the season.

noun

Etymology: Inherited from Middle English autumpne, from Middle French automne, from Old French automne, autonne, from Latin autumnus. Some of the verbal senses are from Latin autumnāre.

1. Traditionally the third of the four seasons, when deciduous trees lose their leaves, and temperatures and daylight hours decrease; typically regarded as spanning the months of September, October, and November in the Northern Hemisphere, and the months of March, April and May in the Southern Hemisphere.

   “autumn leaves”

   “The Spring, the Sommer, / The childing Autumne, angry Winter change / Their wonted Liueries, […]”

2. The time period when someone or something is past its prime.

   “She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn.”

   “It has been portrayed as the well-intended yet wrongly directed reaction to latter-day scholasticism, or as the harvest of medieval theology in its autumn years, as a revolution that is theological, political, economic, cultural—or all of the above.”

3. A person with relatively dark hair and a warm skin tone, seen as best suited to certain colours in clothing.

verb

Etymology: Inherited from Middle English autumpne, from Middle French automne, from Old French automne, autonne, from Latin autumnus. Some of the verbal senses are from Latin autumnāre.

1. To spend the autumn (in a particular place).

   “True it is that, owing to the migratory propensities of our countrymen, every third man has wintered at Naples, springed at Vienna, summered in Switzerland, and autumned on the banks of the Lago Maggiore;”

   “If Tad’s father and Tad had wintered, springed, summered, and autumned together for an hundred years instead of fifteen they could[…]”

2. To (cause to) undergo the changes associated with autumn, such as leaves changing color and falling from trees.

   “The glistening path where weeds had clung, / And tumbled bushes lay, / Was hidden now, but yet there rung / Tones of an autumned May.[…]And cheers rang out, the song and shout, / For the fray had found its eve, / And pirate chief like autumned leaf, / O’er fallen pride did grieve!””

   “[…]he himself roamed with innocent Kate through the fast autumning woods[…]”