faun

[fawn]

noun

Classical Mythology.

1. one of a class of rural deities represented as men with the ears, horns, tail, and later also the hind legs of a goat.

faun

/ fɔːn /

noun

1. (in Roman legend) a rural deity represented as a man with a goat's ears, horns, tail, and hind legs

Other Word Forms

• faunlike adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of faun¹

1325–75; Middle English (< Old French faune ) < Latin faunus; Faunus

Word History and Origins

Origin of faun¹

C14: back formation from Faunes (plural), from Latin _Faunus

Example Sentences

Here, though, all the dancers are the faun and their attention locks not on a nymph but on us.

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“The certificate is a fake, ditto the signature, ditto the spelling, ditto the drawing,” she told The New York Times in reference to one of the works, a drawing of a faun.

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But little actually felt contemporary in this lollipops program of swans and fauns that, musically at least, might have been one of those old-timey Hollywood Bowl “Rhapsody Under the Stars.”

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The group favored the sensualists among the late Victorians — Rossetti and especially Swinburne — and Rosenblitt brings out their “pagan” aestheticism as it emerged in illustrations and motifs of the faun and the goat-god Pan.

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You start out on the roof of the Palais Garnier, where you meet the faun.

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