Other forms: barns
A barn is a big farm building for animals or crops. A red barn, in the barn, barn door.
The great timber-framed ones were built to hold and thresh grain, and the huge doors at each end were placed to let a draught through for winnowing. Couldn't hit a barn door means hopelessly inaccurate. Note that the Old English word is barley plus a word for a building — a barn was a barley house.
1nounbarnA big farm building for animals or crops.
“The farmer keeps hay for the cows in the big red barn.”
barn is a building.
Old English bereern is bere, barley, plus ern, a building. A barn was literally a barley house.
Old English
bearn
Middle English
barn
English, today
barn
Built from
From Middle English barn, bern, bærn, from Old English bearn, bern, contracted forms of Old English berern, bereærn (“barn, granary”), compound of bere (“barley”) and ærn, ræn (“dwelling, barn”), from Proto-West Germanic raʀn, from Proto-Germanic razną (compare Old Norse rann), from pre-Germanic h₁rh̥₁-s-nó-, from Proto-Indo-European h₁erh₁- (“to rest”). More at rest and barley. For the use as a unit of surface area, see w:Barn (unit)#Etymology.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA