tan – English adjective declension

English adjective forms of tan

Adjective: tan

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Comparativetanner
Superlativetannest

Perifrastic

Sample Sentences

  • a tan suit
  • Mine is the white car parked next to the tan pickup truck.
  • The history of suits in politics is long and storied: from Obama’s “shocking” tan suit, now infamous enough to have its own Wikipedia page, […]. [2026 January 2, Jad Salfiti, “What Zohran Mamdani’s suit tells us about the man and the way society is changing”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:]
  • You’re looking very tan this week.

Adjectives inflected like tan

tan, wan, thin,

Etymology

From Middle English tan, from Old French tan (“tanbark”), from Gaulish *tannos (“green oak”) – compare Breton tann (“red oak”), Old Cornish tannen –, from Proto-Celtic *tannos (“green oak”), of uncertain origin, but perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *(s)dʰonu (“fir”). Per this hypothesis, related to Hittite [script needed] (tanau, “fir”), Latin femur, genitive feminis (“thigh”), German Tann (“woods”), Tanne (“fir”), Albanian thanë (“cranberry bush”), Ancient Greek θάμνος (thámnos, “thicket”), Avestan 𐬚𐬀𐬥𐬎𐬎𐬀𐬭𐬆 (θanuuar^ə), Sanskrit धनु (dhánu).