What does "melanin" mean?

Any of a group of naturally occurring dark pigments, especially the pigment found in skin, hair, fur, and feathers.

Melanin

//ˈmɛlənɪn// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Noun

1
Any of a group of naturally occurring dark pigments, especially the pigment found in skin, hair, fur, and feathers. countable, uncountable
"Generally, cephalopod ink includes melanin, enzymes related to melanin production, catecholamines, peptidoglycans, free amino acids and metals (Derby 2014) ."
2
insoluble pigments that account for the color of e.g. skin and scales and feathers wordnet

"A black panther can be a jaguar or leopard, but in either case it has a gene that causes it to produce more melanin than other specimens."

From New Latin, from Ancient Greek stem of μέλας (mélas, “black”) + -in; by surface analysis, melan(o)- + -in.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.