crayon
verbEtymology Borrowed from French crayon (“pencil”), from craie (“chalk”) + -on (diminutive suffix), from Latin crēta (“chalk, clay”), perhaps from crētus.
1
Ambitransitive To draw with a crayon.
- Derived terms
- uncrayoned
crayon
nounUK /ˈkɹeɪ̯.ɒn/ · US /ˈkɹeɪ̯.ɑn/
Etymology Borrowed from French crayon (“pencil”), from craie (“chalk”) + -on (diminutive suffix), from Latin crēta (“chalk, clay”), perhaps from crētus.
1
A stick of colored chalk or wax used for drawing.
2
Obsolete A colored pencil, a colouring pencil
- Let no day pass over you […] without giving some strokes of the pencil or the crayon.1695, C[harles] A[lphonse] du Fresnoy, translated by John Dryden, De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting, […], London: […] J[ohn] Heptinstall for W. Rogers, […], →OCLC:
3
Dated A crayon drawing, or a drawing with colored lines.
- But on the wall hung two fine crayons, representing Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette — pictures which she recognized as having hung in the corridor of the Tuileries — and in front of them were burning two candles on a species of rude altar.1885, Littell's Living Age, volume 167, page 187:
4
Dated A pencil of carbon used in producing electric light.
- Derived terms
- crayon board, crayon eater, crayonist, crayon license, crayonlike, meat crayon, not the sharpest crayon in the box, pencil crayon, porte-crayon, sauce crayon
- Related terms
- cretaceous