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flaxen

UK/ˈflæk.sən/US/ˈflæk.sən/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,473 of 15,258neutral

Flaxen means pale yellow, said of hair. Flaxen hair, a flaxen-haired child, flaxen curls.

It is literary and it names a very specific shade — the pale silvery yellow of dressed flax fibre rather than golden blond. It survives chiefly in descriptions of children and in horse colouring, where a flaxen mane goes with a chestnut coat. Note flax, the plant linen is made from.

Definitions of flaxen

  1. 1adjectiveflaxenPale yellow, said of hair.C2

    “The little girl had flaxen hair that looked almost white in the sun.”

flaxen is a hair colour.

Where it comes from

Old English fleaxen is flax plus -en, an ending meaning made of. Wooden and golden are formed the same way.

  1. Old English

    fleaxen — of flax; flaxen

  2. Middle English

    flaxen

  3. English, today

    flaxen

From Middle English flaxen, flexon, flexin, from Old English fleaxen (“of flax; flaxen”), equivalent to flax + -en. Compare Dutch vlassen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

flaxen in the wild

  • Gwenllian is a Welsh given name, a combination of gwen "fair, blessed, white" and llian "flaxen").

    Gwenllian

  • Flax or flaxen is a pale yellowish-gray, the color of straw or unspun dressed flax.

    Flax (color)

  • The degree of expression of the trait is highly variable, with some chestnuts being only slightly flaxen while others are more so.

    Flaxen (color variant)

  • Flaxen was once thought to be produced by a recessive allele, based on preliminary studies, proposed as Ff for flaxen.

    Flaxen (color variant)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • flax