brownstone
brownstone Lexical Profile
brownstone Game Scores & Validity
• noun
North American An urban row house or townhouse built or faced with reddish-brown sandstone, especially characteristic of 19th-century residential architecture in New York City and other northeastern American cities.
"They renovated a historic four-story brownstone on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn."
North American A dark reddish-brown sandstone formerly widely quarried in the northeastern United States and used as a building and facing material.
"The facade of the nineteenth-century church was constructed from local Connecticut brownstone."
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Coined in mid-19th-century American English as a compound of 'brown' and 'stone,' referring first to the Triassic-Jurassic sandstone quarried in the Connecticut River Valley and New Jersey, and soon after by metonymy to the urban row houses faced with it.