blonde
/blɒnd
/- They are tiny, maybe a year old, and both have fair blonde hair and pale skin.
- It managed to compliment her pale skin and golden blond hair.
- With her bleach blond hair and pale skin, she looks like a reincarnate of Marilyn Monroe in army boots.
Synonyms
- The blonde man was thrown backwards of his horse; dark coloured steed that refused to panic in the following chaos.
- You've taught me a lot about the harmony of colours and I can see that I'm blonde.
- Besides she is blond, and that's my colouring too.
Synonyms
- Laughing and giggling, she tagged the light skin of the blond child, then turned and raced the other way.
- It really didn't matter what you looked like - you could be blonde, blue-eyed or dark-skinned, dark-haired.
- Because he repainted often, he was always calling personnel ordering up fresh blondes, brunettes or redheads.
- Some people like blondes, brunettes or red heads.
- His hair was coloured a very dark blonde, almost brown, and was at medium length.
- But here she was, her hair bleached blonde wearing an extraordinary ensemble and as I found out almost totally unrecognisable.
- It was a small average sized girl with long blonde plaited hair with random purple and indigo streaks in it.
Usage
The alternative spellings blonde and blond correspond to the feminine and masculine forms in French, but in English the distinction is not always made, as English does not have such distinctions of grammatical gender. Thus, blond woman or blonde woman, blond man or blonde man are all used. The word is more commonly used of women, though, and in the noun the spelling is typically blonde. In American usage the usual spelling is blond for both adjective and noun.
Derivatives
blondish
- The man in question he said was about 170 centimetres tall, of fairly solid build, with short blondish beach-coloured hair.
- His mother smiled, her curly blondish hair seeming the perfect frame for her youthful, forty-year-old face.
- His blondish brown hair was shaggy, and hung down to his glasses.
blondness
- Nor would you have said anything similar in this country during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, whose portraits over the years increasingly exaggerated the blondness of her hair.
- Simultaneously, however, a battle over the symbolism of blondness was taking place in other parts of Europe where the Virgin Mary was being portrayed as a blonde.
- Her blondness came mostly from a bottle, but she had been such a sweetly pretty little girl with blonde ringlets that some of the older townspeople still called her Goldilocks.
Origin
Late 15th century: from French blond, blonde, from medieval Latin blundus 'yellow', perhaps from Germanic.
Long before it referred to fair-haired women who were dizzy or dumb, blonde simply meant ‘yellow’. Blond (m.) or blonde (f.) means ‘fair-haired’ in French, but the word was descended from medieval Latin blondus ‘yellow’. The adjective was adopted by the English at the end of the 15th century, but the noun use, ‘a blonde woman’, dates only from the 19th century, since when the desirability of blondes has become almost proverbial. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the title of a 1925 book by Anita Loos, which in 1953 was made into a film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and the album Blondes Have More Fun was released by Rod Stewart in 1978. See also bomb, diamond