The technique of trilinear analysis was applied to characterize the steady-state room-temperature fluorescence of the probe 2-(p-toluidino)naphthalene-6-sulfonate (TNS) in various solvents. Our approach recognizes that the fluorescence of a mixture of fluorophores is separately linear in each of the independent variables of excitation wavelength, emission wavelength, and probe concentration. We confirmed the sensitivity of TNS emission to solvent characteristics and resolved the contributions of three distinct components to the overall TNS fluorescence spectrum. Our results are consistent with the existence of three distinct excited states and further demonstrate that the limitation of previous studies to a single excitation wavelength led to an incomplete characterization of TNS emission in aqueous solutions. TNS fluorescence is attributed to emission from the conventional pi --> pi* excited state with a nonplanar orientation of the phenyl and naphthalene rings, from a charge-transfer state with a coplanar arrangement of the ring systems, and from a charge-transfer state with a nonplanar ring orientation induced by protonation of or hydrogen bonding to the bridging nitrogen atom.