Somebody who looks drawn has a tense, tired face — pale, thin and strained. She looked drawn, pale and drawn, drawn with worry.
It describes the face rather than the body, and it suggests strain over time rather than one bad night. Pale and drawn is nearly a fixed phrase. The word is also the past participle of draw in all its senses — a drawn picture, a drawn match, drawn curtains, drawn from the same source — and drawn to somebody means attracted to them. Note long-drawn-out, meaning far longer than it needed to be.
1adjectivedrawnLooking tense and tired in the face.
“He looked drawn and about ten years older.”
2adjectiveattractedAttracted to somebody or something.
“She was drawn to the quietest person in the room.”
drawn is a strained appearance.
Drawn is the participle of draw, an Old English verb meaning to pull. The tired face is a face pulled tight, which is the same image as drawn curtains and a drawn sword — everything in the family is being pulled.
Middle English
drawen
English
draw
English, today
drawn
Built from
Morphologically draw + n. draw comes from Middle English drawen. The verb is derived from Middle English dragen, draghen, draue, drauen, drauhen, drawe, drawen, draȝe, draȝen, draȝhenn (“to drag, pull; to draw (out); to attract; to entice, lure; to lead; to make a drawing; to move, travel; etc.”), from Old English dragan (“to drag, draw”), from Proto-West Germanic dragan (“to carry, haul”), from Proto-Germanic draganą (“to carry, draw, pull”); further etymology uncertain, often said to be from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ- (“to drag, pull, run”), but possibly from a non-Indo-European substrate root which is also the source of Latin trahō (“to pull, draw; etc.”). a doublet of drag and draught. The noun is derived from Middle English drau, draue (“action of shooting with a bow”), from drauen, drawen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA