Other forms: bronzes
Bronze is the brownish-gold metal of statues and third-place medals, made by mixing copper with a little tin, and harder than either on its own. A green-streaked horseman in a city square, a church bell, a medal on a striped ribbon.
As a colour word it means warm brown with a gold shine: bronze paint, bronze eyeshadow, bronze skin after a fortnight in the sun. In sport, bronze is third place, one step below silver. Old bronze left outdoors turns a pale green called verdigris, which is why so many statues are green rather than brown. The Bronze Age is the long stretch of history named after the metal, sitting between the Stone Age and the Iron Age. Do not mix it up with brass, a different recipe of copper and zinc, yellower, and used for trumpets and door handles.
1nounhardA hard metal made by mixing copper with tin.~66%
“The gates are cast in bronze and weigh half a tonne each.”
2nounbronzeA medal given for third place.~30%
“She took bronze in the 400 metres and cried on the podium anyway.”
3nounstatueA statue or other object made of this metal.~2%
“The gallery keeps a small bronze of a dancer beside the window.”
4adjectivecolourOf a warm brownish-gold colour.~2%
“His arms had gone bronze after a summer of roofing.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Bronze reached English from French bronze, which had it from Italian bronzo in the thirteenth century, and there the trail goes cold: nobody knows where the Italians found it. The English word is first recorded around 1721, in the writing of Matthew Prior, although people had been casting the metal for thousands of years before anyone called it that.
Italian
bronzo
French
bronze
English, today
bronze
From French bronze (1511); from Italian bronzo (13th c.), of unknown origin (q.v.). First use appears 1721 in the writings of Matthew Prior (for which, see citation below).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA