Word of the Day

: September 3, 2013

brown study

noun BROWN-STUD-ee

What It Means

: a state of serious absorption or abstraction

brown study in Context

"I fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a voice at my side made me start." - From Charles Dickens's 1850 novel David Copperfield

"He was staring fixedly ahead, lost in a brown study, the pupils of his eyes slightly blurred." - From Georgette Heyer 's 1958 novel Venetia

Did You Know?

"Lack of company will soon lead a man into a brown study." Whether or not it's true, that 1532 admonition is the first known example that shows the "reverie" sense of "study" combined with "brown" (in the old and now rare sense of "gloomy"). Today, not all brown studies are "gloomy"-some are merely abstracted-but not, we hope, to the extent that provoked the editors of an encyclopedia of the 1950s to call it "a state nearly related to hypnosis and characterized by the ... arrest of bodily movement."