black and tan

1. 1.

   an English recruit (who wore a uniform that was black and tan) serving in the Irish constabulary to suppress the Sinn Fein rebellion of 1919 to 1921

   Broaderrecruit

Questions about black and tan

What does black and tan mean?

black and tan means "an English recruit (who wore a uniform that was black and tan) serving in the Irish constabulary to suppress the Sinn Fein rebellion of 1919 to 1921".

Is black and tan a common word?

black and tan is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.