Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A large farm building used for storing farm products and sheltering livestock.
  • noun A large shed for the housing of vehicles, such as railroad cars.
  • noun A particularly large, typically bare building.
  • noun Physics A unit of area equal to 10−24 square centimeters, used to measure cross sections in nuclear physics.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To store up in a barn.
  • noun A child.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb obsolete To lay up in a barn.
  • noun A covered building used chiefly for storing grain, hay, and other productions of a farm. In the United States a part of the barn is often used for stables.
  • noun (Zoöl.) an owl of Europe and America (Aluco flammeus, or Strix flammea), which frequents barns and other buildings.
  • noun (Zoöl.) the common American swallow (Hirundo horreorum), which attaches its nest of mud to the beams and rafters of barns.
  • noun obsolete A child. See bairn.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun dialect, parts of Northern England A child.
  • noun agriculture A building, often found on a farm, used for storage or keeping animals such as cattle.
  • noun nuclear physics A unit of surface area equal to 10-28 square metres.
  • noun informal, Canada, ice hockey An arena.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an outlying farm building for storing grain or animal feed and housing farm animals
  • noun (physics) a unit of nuclear cross section; the effective circular area that one particle presents to another as a target for an encounter

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English bern, from Old English berærn : bere, barley; see bhares- in Indo-European roots + ærn, house.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English barn, bern, from Old English bearn ("child, son, offspring, prodigy") and Old Norse barn ("child"). More at bairn.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English bern, from Old English bereærn 'barn, granary', compound of bere 'barley' and ærn, ræn 'dwelling, barn', from Proto-Germanic *raznan (cf. Old High German erin, Old Norse rann), from pre-Germanic *h₁rh̥₁-s-nó-, from Proto-Indo-European *h₁erh₁- 'to rest'. More at rest and barley.

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Examples

  • *pondurs combynin teh dairee barn an teh nawtee barn*

    EENY, MEENY, - Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures of Cats - I Can Has Cheezburger? 2010

  • If you've lived in the West very long, you may be familiar with the term barn dance, but I'll bet you've never heard of this one - a riding demonstration, art show and sale, silent auction, live entertainment and a dinner / dance held in an indoor arena, all during the same evening.

    The Denver Newspaper Agency YourHub.com Stories 2008

  • And the work inside the barn is about bending the limitations of wood.

    How to put on an f---ing Mamet play in nineteen f---ing days 2009

  • And the work inside the barn is about bending the limitations of wood.

    Lance Mannion: 2009

  • The idea of a poor family denied any kind of welfare and having to give birth in a barn is appealing to a bleeding-heart lefty like me.

    Archive 2008-12-01 lili 2008

  • The idea of a poor family denied any kind of welfare and having to give birth in a barn is appealing to a bleeding-heart lefty like me.

    Scrooges Beware lili 2008

  • They are piled floor-to-ceiling in storage rooms, and fill up what he calls a "barn," though the structure was erected not for livestock and hay bales but for broken pinball games.

    Wired Top Stories Matthew Shechmeister 2011

  • And I believe it's going to be what you call a barn-burner.

    unknown title 2009

  • The separate 15,000-square-foo t "sports barn" is a faithful reproduction of Assembly Hall, the basketball arena at Indiana University where the Hoosiers play.

    Forrest Lucas Wins Conseco Mansion Erik Holm 2010

  • Across the farmyard from his family's kitchen, inside an old barn, is the tiny workshop where James Swift and his two butchers are turning the finest free-range, rare breed Welsh pigs into the finest free-range, rare-breed charcuterie: sausages, salamis, saucisson, prosciutto, chorizo … the list goes on.

    Best UK Food Producer 2010: Trealy Farm, Monmouthshire Carole Cadwalladr 2010

Comments

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  • A unit of area for measuring the reaction cross-section (generally different from the geometric cross-section) of atomic nuclei and subatomic particles in the study of their interactions with other nuclei or particles. A barn is equal to 10 to 24 square cm. The name, coined by U.S. scientists, is derived from the phrase "side of a barn"--something easy to hit.

    November 7, 2007