brown [OE] In Old English brown simply meant ‘dark’. It acquired its modern sense in Middle English. The idea of darkness developed into a further sense of ‘gloomy or serious’, and this is the sense that occurs in the 16th-century phrase a brown study, ‘absorbed in one’s thoughts’. The use of ‘study’ is puzzling to us today. It is not a room for working in, but a state of daydreaming or meditation, a meaning long out of use in English. See also auburn, baize.