Etymology: Appears in English in second half of 16th cent. as cloyne or cloine , and clowne . The phonetic relation between these is difficult to understand; the former is especially obscure: possibly a dialect form. By Dunbar, the word (if indeed the same) is written cloun ; but it rhymes with tone , Joun , meaning tune , June , both having in Scottish the sound /ʏ/ or /ø/, which would imply /klʏn/. Words identical or closely related appear in several of the cognate languages and dialects: e.g. North Frisian (Moringer dialect) ‘klönne (or klünne ) ‘clumsy lout, lumpish fellow’ (Bendsen) < Old Frisian type *klunda weak masculine. Compare North Frisian insular dialect Amrum klünj (plural klünjar ) ‘clod, clot, lump’ = Sylt klünd ‘clog, wooden mall’ < Old Frisian type *klund strong masculine. Also modern Icelandic klunni < *klunþi ‘clumsy boorish fellow’ (Vigfusson), ‘en klods, ubehændig person’ (Jonson), compared with Swedish dialect klunn , kluns (Rietz) ‘clump, clog, log’, and Danish dialect klunds = klods ‘block, log, stump’, also ‘clown’. In Dutch also, Sewell (1766) has kleun (feminine) (marked as a ‘low word’) ‘a hoidon or lusty bouncing girl’, kloen , noun with same sense; and he explains English clown as ‘een plompe boer, kinkel, kloen ’. Bilderdijk Verklarende Geslachtlijst (1832) says that kloen applied to a man signifies een lompert , ‘clown’ in English, and so is it with klont , kluit , and kluts or klots , all meaning primarily ‘clod, clot, lump’. So far as concerns the sense-development, then, it is clear that we have here a word meaning originally ‘clod, clot, lump’, which like these words themselves (see clod n. 5, clot n. 4), has been applied in various languages to a clumsy boor, a lout. Of an Old English type, corresponding to the Frisian, or to the Dutch words, we have no trace, no more than of the occurrence in English of the primitive sense ‘clod’; and it is probable that in English the word is of later introduction from some Low German source.

Etymology: < clown n.