barn1
/bɑːn
/noun
1A large farm building used for storing grain, hay, or straw or for housing livestock.Also within the wall would have been a well, latrines, a chapel, workshops, barns, pens for livestock, hen houses and perhaps other outbuildings....
- On the way to the working farm, they marvel at the bucolic scene - rolling hills with acres of corn and soybean fields, the green pastures interspersed with barns and farm houses.
- Clean livestock barns have fewer fly problems.
Synonyms
outbuilding, shed, outhouse, shelter;
stable, mews, stall, pound, sty, coop;
Dutch barn, byre
British dialect linhay
archaic grange, garner
1.1North American A large shed used for storing road or railway vehicles.One barn featured rapid transit cars that were awaiting some restoration....
- ALL Santa wants for Christmas is a new barn, shed or stable for his sleigh.
- In the car barn we saw numbers 2002 through 6 in various stages of build.
1.2A large and uninviting building: a great barn of a pub...
- It was a great barn of a place with a cement floor, fibreboard partitions and windows only at the extreme river end.
- If you're not enlightened, Savemart is this big second-hand barn of a store nestled in the industrial sprawl of northern Te Rapa.
- He had a whole room of metal-working equipment, a room full of wood-working equipment, and this huge barn of a room for electronics.
Origin
Old English bern, berern, from bere 'barley' + ern, ærn 'house'.
A barn was originally a place for storing barley (Old English), the word coming from Old English from bere ‘barley’ and ern ‘house’. In the 1940s barn started to be used in particle physics as a unit of areas. It is apparently from the phrase as big as a barn door, a long established measure of size.
Rhymes
barn2
/bɑːn/(abbreviation b)
noun Physics
A unit of area, 10−28 square metres, used especially in particle physics.While the barn is not an SI unit, it is accepted (although discouraged) for use with the SI....
- The barn is typically used to measure the cross section for nuclear reactions.
- Cross-sections are measured in barns, 10-28 m2.
Origin
1940s: apparently from the phrase as big as a barn door.