sienna
Americannoun
-
a ferruginous earth used as a yellowish-brown pigment raw sienna or, after roasting in a furnace, as a reddish-brown pigment burnt sienna.
-
the color of such a pigment.
noun
-
a natural earth containing ferric oxide used as a yellowish-brown pigment when untreated ( raw sienna ) or a reddish-brown pigment when roasted ( burnt sienna )
-
the colour of this pigment See also burnt sienna
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of sienna
1750–60; < Italian ( terra di ) Sien ( n ) a (earth of ) Siena
Explanation
Sienna is the color of Italian dirt. It’s named after Sienna, Italy, where Renaissance painters first got the earthy pigment. It ranges from the yellowish raw sienna like sand, or the darker brownish red of burnt sienna. You can draw a sienna cow with a reddish-brown crayon, or describe your grandparents' carpet as sienna. Artists also use sienna for the natural pigment that contains iron oxide. Sienna is yellowish-brown, and it takes on a darker, redder tint when it's heated. It's a common pigment in oil paints and has been used since the sixteenth century, when it was produced in the Italian city of Sienna.
Vocabulary lists containing sienna
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The progression of the façades from warm rose to pink-cream to mauve-green is knit together by the blues and sienna of the windows, anchored by the staccato pink and green water below.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 11, 2025
“We chose this beautiful sienna, saffron color that evokes the sunset, because this is the sunset before the golden hour,” Love said.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 10, 2023
The décor is a crucial step up from Ikea — anodyne good taste, in shades of sienna and blue-gray, with a pop of burnt orange.
From New York Times ● Aug. 2, 2022
“If I if I sell you a tube of ‘burnt sienna,’ that is God’s honest burnt sienna, dug up out of the ground, burned in an oven,” Cole says.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 21, 2021
He was darker than Mrs. Baylor—darker than a burnt sienna crayon.
From "It All Comes Down to This" by Karen English
They both painted in contrasting dark and light hues, favoring palettes of darker, earthy pigments: bone black, ocher, umber, siennas and lead white.
From New York Times ● Oct. 22, 2019
Browns, purples and siennas set off touches of yellow and green in the vibrant collection of loosely fitting gowns - and a touch of menswear - that played with contrasts.
From Washington Times ● Sep. 27, 2017
Browns, purples and siennas set off touches of yellow and green in the vibrant collection of loosely fitting gowns — and a touch of menswear — that played with contrasts.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 27, 2017
Pure cobalt, violent rose, and purple, are of frequent occurrence in his distances; pure siennas and other browns in his foregrounds, and that not as expressive of lighted but of local color.
From Modern Painters Volume I (of V) by Ruskin, John
The umbers are in the same class with the siennas and ochres.
From The Painter in Oil A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors by Parkhurst, Daniel Burleigh
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
