color

Meanings

Noun

  • The spectral composition of visible light.
  • A subset thereof:
  • A paint.
  • Human skin tone, especially as an indicator of race or ethnicity.
  • Skin color, noted as normal, jaundiced, cyanotic, flush, mottled, pale, or ashen as part of the skin signs assessment.
  • A flushed appearance of blood in the face; redness of complexion.
  • Richness of expression; detail or flavour that is likely to generate interest or enjoyment.
  • A standard, flag, or insignia:
  • An award for sporting achievement, particularly within a school or university.
  • The morning ceremony of raising the flag.
  • A property of quarks, with three values called red, green, and blue, which they can exchange by passing gluons.
  • A third-order measure of derivative price sensitivity, expressed as the rate of change of gamma with respect to time, or equivalently the rate of change of charm with respect to changes in the underlying asset price.
  • The relative lightness or darkness of a mass of written or printed text on a page. (See )
  • Any of the colored balls excluding the reds.
  • A front or facade; an ostensible truth actually false; pretext.
  • An appearance of right or authority; color of law.

Adjective

  • Conveying color, as opposed to shades of gray.

Verb

  • To give something color.
  • To apply colors to the areas within the boundaries of a line drawing using colored markers or crayons.
  • To become red through increased blood flow.
  • To affect without completely changing.
  • To attribute a quality to; to portray (as).
  • To assign colors to the vertices of a graph (or the regions of a map) so that no two vertices connected by an edge (regions sharing a border) have the same color.

Related

Similar words

Opposite words

Narrower meaning words

Broader meaning words

Origin

  • From Middle English colour, color, borrowed from Anglo-Norman colur, from Old French colour, color, from Latin color. Displaced English blee, Middle English blee, from Old English blēo. Also partially replaced Old English hīew ("color") and its descendants, which is less often used in this sense. couleur.
  • In the US, the spelling color is used to match the spelling of the word's Latin etymon and to make all derivatives consistent (colorimeter, coloration, colorize, colorless, etc). Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the spelling colour has been retained.

Modern English dictionary

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