Mahogany is a dark reddish-brown hardwood, and the colour named after it. It was the timber of choice for fine furniture from the eighteenth century onwards, which is why a mahogany table means an expensive one.
As a colour word it is used mainly of hair, wood and leather, and it means a rich brown with red in it — deeper than chestnut, warmer than walnut. The wood itself is now largely protected: most true mahogany is restricted by international trade rules, so modern mahogany furniture is often veneer over something cheaper, or a different species sold under the name.
1nounhardA hard reddish-brown wood used for fine furniture.
“The desk is solid mahogany and weighs a ton.”
2adjectivemahoganyOf a deep reddish-brown colour.
“She has mahogany hair that goes red in sunlight.”
mahogany is a wood, or a colour.
The word came into English through Portuguese from a West African language, and the tree it names grows in the Caribbean and Central America. The route the word took — Africa to Europe to the Americas — follows the trade that carried the timber.
yo
moganwo — trees
Portuguese
mogano
English, today
mahogany
A word of unknown origin, concocted in either English or Middle Dutch - from one or more exotic phytonyms and common European words. 1 Alternatively from Portuguese mogano, mógono, obsolete forms of mogno, itself of unknown origin (often suggested to be from the English word instead of the reverse), perhaps from an extinct indigenous language, such as a myn - language originally spoken in Honduras or a South American language, but no known cognates survive. Another theory attempts to link yo moganwo (“trees”) literally “tall ones”yo, but this has been criticized.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Colours & Patterns, Antiques & Collecting