crayon

Borrowed from French crayon (“pencil”), from craie (“chalk”) + -on (“(diminutive)”), from Latin creta (“chalk, clay”), from crētus.

• enPR: krāʹän
• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹeɪ.ən/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹeɪ.ɒn/, [ˈkʰɹeɪ.ɑn]; also /ˈkɹeɪ.ɔn/ (the most common pronunciations, used by 83% of Americans)[1]
• (US, uncommon, especially Northeastern US, Midwestern US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹæn/, [ˈkɹeən][1]
• (US, rare, especially Philadelphia, New Jersey, sometimes Southern US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɹaʊn/, [ˈkɹɛɔn~ˈkɹæɔn][1]
• Rhymes: -aʊn

crayon (plural crayons)

1. A stick of colored chalk or wax used for drawing.
2. A colored pencil, a colouring pencil
   • Dryden

     Let no day pass over you […] without giving some strokes of the pencil or the crayon.

3. (dated) A crayon drawing.
   • 1885, Littell's Living Age (volume 167, page 187)

     But on the wall hung two fine crayons, representing Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette — pictures which she recognized as having hung in the corridor of the Tuileries — and in front of them were burning two candles on a species of rude altar.

4. (dated) A pencil of carbon used in producing electric light.

• colored pencil (for sense 2)
• pencil crayon (for sense 2)

• Conté

crayon (third-person singular simple present crayons, present participle crayoning, simple past and past participle crayoned)

1. (transitive, intransitive) To draw with a crayon.

• acyron

craie (“chalk”) +‎ -on (“(diminutive)”), from Latin crēta (“chalk, clay”), from crētus.

• IPA^(key): /kʁɛ.jɔ̃/

• audio

  (file)

crayon m (plural crayons)

1. pencil
2. (colloquial) pen

• “crayon” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).