Wiktionary

yellow

English

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Various shades of yellow

Alternative forms

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  • yeallow (obsolete); yeller (dialectal or pronunciation spelling), yaller (pronunciation spelling)

Pronunciation

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Etymology 1

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    From Middle English yelwe, yelou, from Old English ġeolwe, oblique form of Old English ġeolu, from Proto-West Germanic *gelu, from Proto-Germanic *gelwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃wós, from *ǵʰelh₃- (“gleam, yellow”).

    Cognate with Scots yella (“yellow”), North Frisian gööl, güül (“yellow”), Saterland Frisian jeel (“yellow”), West Frisian giel (“yellow”), Cimbrian gel, ghéel (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”), Dutch Low Saxon gael, gel (“yellow”), German gelb, gehl (“yellow”), German Low German gel, geel, gęl, gäl (“yellow”), Luxembourgish giel (“yellow”), Vilamovian gaoł (“yellow”), Yiddish געל (gel), געלב (gelb, “yellow”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish gul (“yellow”), Faroese and Icelandic gulur (“yellow”). Compare also Welsh gell (“bay, tawny”), 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”), Russian жёлтый (žóltyj, “yellow”), Russian зелёный (zeljónyj, “green”).

    The verb is from Middle English yelwen, ȝalowen, ȝolewen, from Old English ġeolwian, from the adjective.

    Noun

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    English Wikipedia has an article on:
    Wikipedia

    yellow (countable and uncountable, plural yellows)

    1. The color of sunflower petals and lemons; the color obtained by mixing green and red light, or by subtracting blue from white light; the color evoked by light of wavelength around 580 nm; one of the three primary colors in subtractive color systems.
      yellow:  
      • 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.
      • 2025 March 29, Kristen Rogers, “Over half of US states are trying to eliminate food dyes. Here’s what you can do now”, in CNN‎[2]:
        Red No. 3, red No. 40, blue No. 2 and green No. 3 all have been linked with cancer or tumors in animals. Other sources say red No. 40 and yellow No. 5 and No. 6 contain or may be contaminated with known carcinogens.
    2. (US) The middle light in a set of three traffic lights, the lighting of which indicates that drivers should stop short of the intersection if it is safe to do so.
    3. (snooker) One of the color 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 colored species. Compare sulphur.
      • 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 297:
        Several other beautiful butterflies rewarded my search in this place [...] The most abundant butterflies were the whites and yellows (Pieridae), several of which I had already found at Lombock and at Coupang, while others were new to me.
    Synonyms
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    • (light wavelengths): xantho- (xanth-)
    • (intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights): amber (British)
    Hyponyms
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    Coordinate terms
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    • (light in a set of three traffic lights): red, green
    Derived terms
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    Translations
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    Adjective

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    yellow (comparative yellower, superlative yellowest)

    1. Of a yellow hue.
      Antonyms: nonyellow, unyellow
      He had a yellow laptop in his bag.
      • 1667, John Milton, “Book X”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, line 434:
        A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought / First fruits, the green ear and the yellow sheaf.
      • 1827, [John Keble], “Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity”, in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume II, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J. Parker; and C[harles] and J[ohn] Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 85:
        Red o'er the forest glows the setting sun, / The line of yellow light dies fast away / That crown'd the eastern copse, and chill and dun / Falls on the moor the brief November day.
      • 1911, J. Milton Hayes, The green eye of the little yellow god:
        There's a one-eyed yellow idol / To the north of Kathmandu; / There's a little marble cross below the town; / And a brokenhearted woman / Tends the grave of 'Mad' Carew, / While the yellow god for ever gazes down.
    2. (informal) Lacking courage.
      Synonym: cowardly
    3. (publishing, journalism) Characterized by sensationalism, lurid content, and doubtful accuracy.
      • 2004 October 4, Doreen Carvajal, “Photo edict muffles gossipy press”, in International Herald Tribune, 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, ethnic slur, of the skin) Of a hue attributed to Far East Asians, especially the Chinese.
    5. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Far East Asian (relating to Asian people).
      • 1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu‎[4]:
        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.
      • 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter VI, in Capricornia‎[5], page 64:
        "Eh, Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?".
      • 1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins, published 2001, page 74:
        A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me. “Give us a drink, yeller feller.”
    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. (UK politics) Related to the Liberal Democrats.
      yellow constituencies
    9. (politics) Related to the Free Democratic Party, a political party in Germany.
      the black–yellow coalition
    Derived terms
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    Translations
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    Verb

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

    1. (intransitive) To become yellow or yellower.
      • 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York: Review Books, published 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 yellower.
    3. (transitive, historical, Royal Navy) To promote (a captain) to flag rank without command of a squadron, ending his career; to make him a yellow admiral.
      • 1938, C. S. Forester, chapter 2, in A Ship of the Line, London: Michael Joseph:
        Then they might yellow him if they wanted to; he would be satisfied with Admiral’s rank.
    Translations
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    Etymology 2

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    From the colors used on traffic lights; yellow being the one for warning vehicles to stop soon.

    Interjection

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    yellow

    1. (BDSM, procedure word) Used to indicate that the speaker needs a temporary break from current sexual activity.
      Coordinate terms: green, red

    See also

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    Colo(u)rs in English (layout · text)
                 red          orange              yellow              green              blue (incl.      indigo)              purple / violet
                     magenta, pink          brown              cyan, teal, turquoise      white              gray/grey      black

    References

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    1. ^ Kurath, Hans; McDavid, Raven I., Jr. (1961), The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States: based upon the collections of the linguistic atlas of the Eastern United States‎[1], Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, § 134.

    Further reading

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    • “yellow”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

    Anagrams

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