What is "barn"

Barn \Barn\ (b[aum]rn), n. [OE. bern, AS. berern, bern; bere barley + ern, [ae]rn, a close place. [root]92. See Barley.] A covered building used chiefly for storing grain, hay, and other productions of a farm. In the United States a part of the barn is often used for stables.

Barn owl (Zo["o]l.), an owl of Europe and America ( Aluco flammeus, or Strix flammea), which frequents barns and other buildings.

Barn swallow (Zo["o]l.), the common American swallow ( Hirundo horreorum), which attaches its nest of mud to the beams and rafters of barns.

Barn \Barn\, v. t. To lay up in a barn. [Obs.]
--Shak.

Men . . . often barn up the chaff, and burn up the grain.
--Fuller.

Barn \Barn\, n. A child. See Bairn. [Obs.]

Old English bereærn "barn," literally "barley house," from bere "barley" (see barley) + aern "house," metathesized from *rann, *rasn (cognates: Old Norse rann, Gothic razn "house," Old English rest "resting place;" sealtærn "saltworks").\n\nBarley was not always the only crop grown as the data recovered at Bishopstone might suggest but it is always the most commonly represented, followed by wheat and then rye and oats.

[C.J. Arnold, "An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms," 1988, p.36]

Etymology 1 n. (label en agriculture) A building, often found on a farm, used for storage or keeping animals such as cattle. vb. (context transitive English) To lay up in a barn. Etymology 2

n. (context dialect parts of Northern England English) A child.

1. n. an outlying farm building for storing grain or animal feed and housing farm animals

2. (physics) a unit of nuclear cross section; the effective circular area that one particle presents to another as a target for an encounter [syn: b]

A barn (symbol b) is a unit of area equal to 10 m (100 fm). Originally used in nuclear physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and nuclear reactions, today it is also used in all fields of high-energy physics to express the cross sections of any scattering process, and is best understood as a measure of the probability of interaction between small particles. A barn is approximately the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus. The barn is also the unit of area used in nuclear quadrupole resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance to quantify the interaction of a nucleus with an electric field gradient. While the barn is not an SI unit, the SI standards body accepts its use with SI units due to its continued use in particle physics.

A barn is an agricultural building usually located on farms and used for various purposes. In the North American area, a barn refers to structures that house livestock, including cattle and horses, as well as equipment and fodder, and often grain. As a result, the term barn is often qualified e.g. tobacco barn, dairy barn, sheep barn, potato barn. In the British Isles and Continental Europe, the term barn is restricted mainly to storage structures for unthreshed cereals and fodder, the terms byre or shippon being applied to cow shelters, whereas horses are kept in buildings known as stables. On the Continent, however, barns were often part of integrated structures known as byre-dwellings (or housebarns in US literature). In addition, barns may be used for equipment storage, as a covered workplace, and for activities such as threshing.

A barn is a farm building for livestock and hay storage.

Barn may also refer to:

• Barn (unit), a unit of cross section area used in nuclear and particle physics
• Barn (Welsh magazine), a current affairs magazine from Wales
• Barn, West Virginia, a community in the United States
• The Barn (Los Angeles), a house built by A. Quincy Jones
• The Barn, the former Alan Irish Barn, an art and music studio in Vermont, US
• Bärn, German name of the town Moravský Beroun, Czech Republic

Barn ( Welsh for 'Opinion') is a monthly Welsh language current affairs magazine. It was established in 1962 and over 500 issues have been published. Its first editor was Emlyn Evans and it was published by Llyfrau'r Dryw, Llandybie (later Swansea). Its current editors are now Vaughan Hughes and Menna Baines, who took over from Dyfrig Jones in 2008, and the magazine is now published by Gwasg Dinefwr.

Barn includes articles relating to politics, language, culture, art and sport from Wales, the UK and abroad from a Welsh perspective. The magazine has a prominent place in the history of the Welsh language and the Welsh nationalist movement in the second half of the 20th century, particularly under the editorial-ship of Alwyn D. Rees.