autumn

From Middle English autumpne, from Old French automne, from Latin autumnus.

• enPR: ôʹtəm
  • (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈɔːtəm/
  • (US) IPA^(key): /ˈɔtəm/, [ˈɔɾɪ̈m], [ˈɔɾm̩]

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  • Audio (US)

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• Rhymes: -ɔːtəm
• Hyphenation: au‧tumn

autumn (countable and uncountable, plural autumns)

Autumn in the United States

1. Traditionally the third of the four seasons, when deciduous trees lose their leaves; typically regarded as being from September 24 to December 22 in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, and the months of March, April and May in the Southern Hemisphere.
   • 1918, W. B. Maxwell, chapter 22, in The Mirror and the Lamp:

     In the autumn there was a row at some cement works about the unskilled labour men. A union had just been started for them and all but a few joined. One of these blacklegs was laid for by a picket and knocked out of time.

2. (by extension) The time period when someone or something is past its prime.
   • 1853, Charles Dickens, Bleak House:

     She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn.

   • 2014, Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel & Lubomír Batka, The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther's Theology, →ISBN:

     It has been portrayed as the well-intended yet wrongly directed reaction to latter-day scholasticism, or as the harvest of medieval theology in its autumn years, as a revolution that is theological, political, economic, cultural—or all of the above.

   • 2014, Berch Berberoglu, The Global Capitalist Crisis and Its Aftermath, →ISBN:

     Unlike the decline of British hegemony, in the current world-system no military or economic contender has emerged to replace US hegemony. Even though the US SCA has entered its autumn with the Vietname War and the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, there has been no legitimate hegemonic contender capable of instituting a new global regime to resolve both social and economic contradictions of global capitalism.

   • 2014, May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal, →ISBN:

     The autumn of life is also a matter of saying farewell, but the strange thing is that I do not feel it is autumn.

3. (fashion) A person with relatively dark hair and a warm skin tone, seen as best suited to certain colours in clothing.

Note that season names are usually uncapitalized in modern English (for example, spring), except when personified (Old Man Winter). This is contrast to the days of the week and months of the year, which are always capitalized (Thursday or September).

• (season): (US, Canada) fall, (UK dialect) harvest, (UK dialect) back end.
• (time when past prime): decline.

autumn (not comparable)

1. Of or relating to autumn; autumnal

   autumn leaves

   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314, page 0045:

     Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes. The clear light of the bright autumn morning had no terrors for youth and health like hers.

• Indian summer