- fawn
- \ \ Fawn ‘young deer’ [14] and fawn ‘grovel’ [13] are two distinct words. The latter did not always have the negative associations of ‘servility’ which it usually carries today.\ \ Originally it simply referred to dogs showing they were happy – by wagging their tails, for instance. It was a derivative of Old English fægen ‘happy’, an adjective of Germanic origin which survives in the archaic fain ‘willingly’ (as in ‘I would fain go’). Fawn ‘young deer’ comes via Old French faon ‘young of an animal’ and Vulgar Latin *fētō from Latin fētus ‘giving birth, offspring’ (whence English foetus). The general sense ‘young of an animal’ survived into the early 17th century in English (James I’s translation of the Psalms, for instance, in 1603, has ‘the fawn of unicorns’ in Psalm 29, where the Authorized Version simply refers to ‘a young unicorn’), but on the whole ‘young of the deer’ seems to have been the main sense of the word from the 15th century onwards. Its use as a colour term, after the pale yellowish brown of a young deer’s coat, dates from the 19th century.\ \ Cf.⇒ FAIN, FOETUS
Word origins - 2ed. J. Ayto. 2005.
