autumn

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Traditionally the third of the four seasons, when deciduous trees lose their leaves, and temperatures and daylight hours decrease; typically regarded as spanning the months of September, October, and November in the Northern Hemisphere, and the months of March, April and May in the Southern Hemisphere.

   “autumn leaves”

   “The Spring, the Sommer, / The childing Autumne, angry Winter change / Their wonted Liueries, […]”

   “In the autumn there was a row at some cement works about the unskilled labour men. A union had just been started for them and all but a few joined. One of these blacklegs was laid for by a picket and knocked out of time.”

   “Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes. The clear light of the bright autumn morning had no terrors for youth and health like hers.”

   “I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom / I sent two letters back in autumn, you must not've got 'em”

2. (broadly, countable, uncountable)The time period when someone or something is past its prime.

   “She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn.”

   “It has been portrayed as the well-intended yet wrongly directed reaction to latter-day scholasticism, or as the harvest of medieval theology in its autumn years, as a revolution that is theological, political, economic, cultural—or all of the above.”

   “Unlike the decline of British hegemony, in the current world-system no military or economic contender has emerged to replace US hegemony. Even though the US SCA has entered its autumn with the Vietname War and the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, there has been no legitimate hegemonic contender capable of instituting a new global regime to resolve both social and economic contradictions of global capitalism.”

   “The autumn of life is also a matter of saying farewell, but the strange thing is that I do not feel it is autumn.”

3. (countable, uncountable)A person with relatively dark hair and a warm skin tone, seen as best suited to certain colours in clothing.

verb

1. (intransitive)To spend the autumn (in a particular place).

   “True it is that, owing to the migratory propensities of our countrymen, every third man has wintered at Naples, springed at Vienna, summered in Switzerland, and autumned on the banks of the Lago Maggiore;”

   “If Tad’s father and Tad had wintered, springed, summered, and autumned together for an hundred years instead of fifteen they could[…]”

   “They wintered in a warm place / And summered in a cold, / But where they springed and autumned / I never have been told.”

   “Floyd Waggaman, the namesake of “Floyd’s Folly,” summered and autumned at Siasconset, which your columnist has been told is hard by Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, or one of the disenchanted isles.”

   “The major’s office, young pudgy Major Lewis whose wife once offered Joe a bag of peanuts and who summered in New England and early-autumned in New York.”

2. (ambitransitive)To (cause to) undergo the changes associated with autumn, such as leaves changing color and falling from trees.

   “The glistening path where weeds had clung, / And tumbled bushes lay, / Was hidden now, but yet there rung / Tones of an autumned May.[…]And cheers rang out, the song and shout, / For the fray had found its eve, / And pirate chief like autumned leaf, / O’er fallen pride did grieve!””

   “[…]he himself roamed with innocent Kate through the fast autumning woods[…]”

   “She turns off towards the river, where the lawns lie autumned on the banks between the frayed golden willow branches.”

   “[…]three quarters, two thirds of the flowering tops have changed colour and these are very resinous, solid buds and the colouration of the leaf, you can see how it’s yellowed off, it’s autumning, autumn has come if you would like to put it that way.”

   “Spirit of Autumn, When I grow tired of using my gifts to benefit others, take me to the autumned fields where earth freely yields the bounty of her summer.[…]All night a steady rain fell upon the autumned earth, moistening every dried crack of the bony summer, rinsing what lay tattered and soiled in the remnants of yesterday.”

name

1. A female given name from English of modern usage, from autumn, the name of the season.