Brunette

Brunette (pronounced broo-net)

(1) Of the hair (particularly females), dark in color, tending to black.

(2) Of a person (less commonly), having dark hair and, often, dark eyes and darkish or olive skin.

(3) A person (particularly if female), with dark hair.

1660s: From the French brunette, the feminine of brunet (of a woman, in complexion, having a brownish tone to the skin and hair), from the Old French brunet (brownish, brown-haired, dark-complexioned), the feminine diminutive of the twelfth century brun (brown), of West Germanic origin, from the Proto-Germanic brunaz, from the primitive Indo-European root bher- (bright; brown); a doublet of burnet.  The now familiar use as a noun (woman with dark hair and eyes and of a dark complexion) emerged in the 1710s and the metathesized form (the Old French burnete) was the source of the surname Burnett.  Burnete was a high quality woolen dyed-cloth of superior quality and originally a dark brown.  The alternative spelling brunet is now rare, even in the US.  Brunette is a noun & adjective and brunetteness is a noun; the noun plural is brunettes.

Dictionaries vary but little in the rage of definitions offered of brunette, most entries something like that in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “noun: a woman or girl with dark brown hair”.  In the US, the spelling brunet is listed not as an alternative spelling but a variant, Merriam-Webster noting the distinction between the two as something like the convention of use governing blonde (of females) and blond (of males), brunette being: “a person having brown or black hair and often a relatively dark complexion (spelled brunet when used of a boy or man and usually brunette when used of a girl or woman).  Thus, at least some authoritative sources acknowledge there’s been a shift in the meaning of brunette from the “dark brown hair” inherited from the French to a range of dark shades, extending from brown even to black, essentially all those not blonde, red-headed, grey or white.  So brunette does some heavy-lifting, presumably because there’s no noun for those with true black hair although there are adjectives including “raven-haired” and “jet-black” and of course they’re in the spectrum of those called “dark-haired”.  Suggestions English speakers adopt noirette (black-haired woman) seem to have been ignored and the idea use of the French noiraud & noiraude (the masculine & feminine forms meaning “swarthy” was a good idea didn’t survive the revelation the terms were used mostly by farmers of black cattle.

In English, as it applies to hair, brunette has enjoyed a meaning shift from "dark brown" to a spectrum extending even to pure black and now really just denotes "not blonde or a red-head".  Natural red-head Lindsay Lohan illustrates some of the range. 

If one insists the original meaning must be observed, brunette is thus often used with imprecision but there’s clearly been a bit of a meaning-shift and for most purposes the raven haired are now often lumped with the brunettes, something which seems not much to disturb them.  Raven-haired though is probably preferable because it’s so poetic but it seems now to be used only in literature which, given it’s well understood, seems strange but perhaps it has suffered by being so popular in fantasy novels, a genre of which not all approve.  Coal-black (the blackest black) really wasn’t appealing even before climate change made the substance unfashionable although pitch-black might be worse still, pitch a dark, highly viscous material remaining in still after distilling crude oil and tar.  Jet-black is interesting in that it’s both often used (and more often of stuff other than hair) and misunderstood, most apparently thinking there’s some connection to jet-engines.  Jet-black describes a color which is very black and almost wholly devoid of light reflection and the reference is actually to a type of mineraloid known as jet (a black or dark brown fossilized coal-like material formed from the remains of wood that has undergone a specific type of decay under high pressure).  The mineral has for thousands of years been used for decorative and functional applications, such as jewelry and ornamentation, much prized for the striking color (technically an absence of color) and the shiny surface achieved when polished.  So it’s all a question of what one wants to achieve: “Brunette” has wide utility because it’s understood by all to mean “not a blonde or red-head”, phrases like “raven-haired beauty” will always have a certain appeal and if one needs to be more precise about brunettes there’s “auburn”, “chestnut” or even just “brown” white the truly black can be called “jet black”.