yellow

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English[edit]

Various shades of yellow

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English yelwe, yelou, from Old English ġeolwe, oblique form of of Old English ġeolu, from Proto-West Germanic *gelu, from Proto-Germanic *gelwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃wos, from *ǵʰelh₃- (“gleam, yellow”)

Compare Welsh gwelw (“pale”), Latin helvus (“dull yellow”)), Irish geal (“white, bright”), Lithuanian žalias (“green”), Ancient Greek χλωρός (khlōrós, “light green”), Persian زرد‎ (zard, “yellow”), Sanskrit हरि (hari, “greenish-yellow”)). Cognate with German gelb (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”).

The verb is from Old English ġeolwian, from the adjective.

Pronunciation[edit]

Adjective[edit]

yellow (comparative yellower or more yellow, superlative yellowest or most yellow)

  1. Having yellow as its color.
    Antonyms: nonyellow, unyellow
  2. (informal) Lacking courage.
    Synonym: cowardly
  3. (publishing, journalism) Characterized by sensationalism, lurid content, and doubtful accuracy.
    • 2004, Doreen Carvajal, "Photo edict muffles gossipy press," International Herald Tribune, 4 Oct. (retrieved 29 July 2008),
      The denizens of the gossipy world of the pink press, purple prose and yellow tabloids are shivering over disputed photographs of Princess Caroline of Monaco.
  4. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, racist) Of the skin, having the colour traditionally attributed to Far East Asians, especially Chinese.
    • 1887, H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure‎[1]:
      They were all tall and all handsome, though they varied in their degree of darkness of skin, some being as dark as Mahomed, and some as yellow as a Chinese.
  5. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Far East Asian (relating to Asian people).
    • 1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
      Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.
    • 1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 516:
      The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp.
  6. (dated, Australia, offensive) Of mixed Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry.
  7. (dated, US) Synonym of high yellow
    • 1933 September 9, James Thurber, “My Life and Hard Times—VI. A Sequence of Servants”, in The New Yorker
      Charley threw her over for a yellow gal named Nancy: he never forgave Vashti for the vanishing from his life of a menace that had come to mean more to him than Vashti herself.
  8. (Britain, politics) Related to the Liberal Democrats.
    yellow constituencies
  9. (politics) Related to the Free Democratic Party of Germany.
    the black-yellow coalition

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Noun[edit]

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

yellow (plural yellows)

  1. The colour of gold, butter, or a lemon; the colour obtained by mixing green and red light, or by subtracting blue from white light.
    • 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper:
      It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
  2. (US) The intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights, the illumination of which indicates that drivers should stop short of the intersection if it is safe to do so.
  3. (snooker) One of the colour balls used in snooker, with a value of 2 points.
  4. (pocket billiards) One of two groups of object balls, or a ball from that group, as used in the principally British version of pool that makes use of unnumbered balls (the (yellow(s) and red(s)); contrast stripes and solids in the originally American version with numbered balls).
  5. (sports) A yellow card.
    • 2011 April 15, Saj Chowdhury, “Norwich 2 - 1 Nott'm Forest”, in BBC Sport‎[3]:
      Andrew Surman fired in what proved to be a 37th-minute winner before Forest's Paul Konchesky saw red late on. That second yellow for the loan signing came in stoppage time and did not affect the outcome of a game which Norwich dominated.
  6. Any of various pierid butterflies of the subfamily Coliadinae, especially the yellow coloured species. Compare sulphur.

Synonyms[edit]

  • (intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights): amber (British)

Antonyms[edit]

  • (intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights): red, green

Hyponyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

yellow (third-person singular simple present yellows, present participle yellowing, simple past and past participle yellowed)

  1. (intransitive) To become yellow or more yellow.
    • 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York Review Books 2006, page 47:
      Then suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows in from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath.
    • 2013, Robert Miraldi, Seymour Hersh, Potomac Books, Inc. (→ISBN), page 187:
      Interviews, clippings, yellowing stories from foreign newspapers, notebooks with old scribblings. Salisbury called it the debris of a reporter always too much on the run to sort out the paper, but there it was, an investigator's dream, […]
  2. (transitive) To make (something) yellow or more yellow.

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

Colors in English · colors, colours (layout · text)
     white      gray, grey      black
             red; crimson              orange; brown              yellow; cream
             lime              green              mint
             cyan; teal              azure, sky blue              blue
             violet; indigo              magenta; purple              pink

References[edit]

  1. ^ Hans Kurath and Raven Ioor McDavid (1961). The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States: based upon the collections of the linguistic atlas of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 134.

Anagrams[edit]

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