adjective
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informal
thoroughly discouraged or disheartened; fed up
"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged"
2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986
© HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005,
2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
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Very angry, as in When she locked me out I was really browned off. This expression originated as Royal Air Force slang for “disgusted” and “depressed” in the late 1930s and had crossed the Atlantic by World War II. It gradually came to be used more widely as a slangy synonym for “infuriated.” One theory for its origin, mentioned by Eric Partridge in his slang dictionary, is that it alludes to brass buttons on a uniform turning brown from lack of polishing. Partridge noted, however, that the “predominant Army opinion” was that the word had the same literal meaning as buggered.
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The browned-off marines in Iceland solemnly assessed the place as the "sinkhole of the world," but there was never a word of complaint in Smith's letters to his family in the U.S.
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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.
