tun
/tʌn
/noun
1A large beer or wine cask.In 1347 he sold 3 tuns of wine to the King's Butler; while in 1349 he exported cloth....
- He gave the order for a tun of the local wine to be delivered by packman to the Earl's castle in late summer.
- As for size, the tonnage of ships in this period was reckoned literally in terms of capacity to carry tuns, or casks, of wine.
1.1A brewer’s fermenting vat.The mixture goes through a series of vast tuns until it reaches the small oddly-shaped stills, which the family-run distillery retains to ensure consistency of the whisky....
- The grain-water mixture will now be heated up and pumped to the lauter tun.
2An imperial measure of capacity, equal to 4 hogsheads.The tun itself came to mean a specific size equal to four hogsheads or about 208 gallons.
3 (also tun shell) A large marine mollusc which has a rounded barrel-like shell with broad spirals.
- Family Tonnidae, class Gastropoda.
- Tiny periwinkles, found in profusion in intertidal areas, are gastropods; as are giant tun shells from the deep waters and the quiet limpets who cling to rocks at low tide.
- These tun shells have a large rounded body and are very lightweight for their size.
verb (tuns, tunning, tunned) [with object] archaic
Store (wine or other alcoholic drinks) in a tun.
Origin
Old English tunne, from medieval Latin tunna, probably of Gaulish origin.
ton from Middle English:
Ton is a variant of tun, both spellings being used for the container and the weight in the past. The senses were differentiated in the late 17th century, with tun limited to a ‘cask’. A ton was originally a term for the capacity for a ship, originally the volume of space occupied by a cask or wine. The metric tonne—1 000 kilograms—first appears in English in the late 19th century, adopted from French. A little ton was, in French, a tonel, source of the word tunnel (Late Middle English).