Other forms: brands, branded, branding
A brand is the name and logo a company puts on its products, and everything customers feel about that name. A well-known brand, brand loyalty, own-brand goods.
The word has spread from products to people and organisations — a personal brand, damage to the brand — and that usage is now everywhere in business writing. Brand new means completely new and unused, and it has nothing to do with trade marks. The verb has two lives: to brand cattle is to burn a mark into their hide, which is where the whole word comes from, and to brand somebody a liar is to label them permanently, which uses the same picture.
1nounbrandThe name and identity a company gives its products.
“The brand is worth more than the factories.”
2verblabelTo label somebody permanently as something.
“He was branded a troublemaker and never shook it off.”
3verbburnTo burn a mark into an animal's hide.
“The cattle are branded before they leave.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
brand is a name and identity.
Old English brand meant a burning stick or a torch. Cattle were marked with a hot iron and the mark was called the brand; the maker's mark on a barrel followed, and the modern commercial sense grew from that. Brand new means fresh from the fire.
Proto-Germanic
*brandaz — flame; flaming; fire-brand; torch; sword
Proto-West Germanic
*brand
Old English
brand — fire; flame; burning; torch; sword
Middle English
brand
English, today
brand
From Middle English brand, from Old English brand (“fire; flame; burning; torch; sword”), from Proto-West Germanic brand, from Proto-Germanic brandaz (“flame; flaming; fire-brand; torch; sword”), derived from Proto-Germanic brinnaną (“to burn”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European bʰrewh₁- (“to boil; brew”). Cognate with Scots brand, West Frisian brân (“fire”), Dutch brand, German Brand, Danish brand, Swedish brand (“blaze, fire”), Icelandic brandur, French brand (< Germanic). More distantly cognate with Proto-Slavic gorěti (“to burn”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA