Other forms: sunburns
Sunburn is red painful skin from staying too long in the sun. Get sunburn, bad sunburn, sunburn peeling.
It is radiation damage rather than heat: ultraviolet light breaks the DNA in skin cells and the redness is the repair response, which is why it appears hours later. Repeated sunburn in childhood is the single clearest risk factor for melanoma.
1nounsunburnRed painful skin from staying too long in the sun.
“I forgot to put on sun cream and got terrible sunburn on my shoulders.”
sunburn is a skin injury.
Sun plus burn, in Middle English, from Old English sunne and beornan, to burn.
Middle English
*sunne burnen
English, today
sunburn
Built from
From Middle English sunne burnen, sonne brennen, sunne brennen (suggested by derivatives sonne brennynge, sunne brennynge (“sunburn”) literally “sun-burning” and sunne brente (“sunburnt”), equivalent to sun + burn. Compare West Frisian sinnebrân (“sunburn”), Dutch zonnebrand (“sunburn”), German Sonnenbrand (“sunburn”), Swedish solbränna (“sunburn”), and Icelandic sólbruni (“sunburn”), as well as sunbryne.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA