Other forms: ambers
Amber is a warm golden orange — honey held up to the light, or the middle lamp of a traffic light. It is also the thing that colour is named after: hard yellow resin that ran out of a pine tree millions of years ago and set solid.
That is why amber turns up in museums with insects inside it. A fly landed in the sap, the sap hardened round it, and there it still is, whole, forty million years later. People cut amber into beads and rings, and most of it washes up along the Baltic coast. On the road amber means get ready rather than go: amber then red, and in Britain red and amber together just before green. As a colour word it suits lights, drinks and stones — a glass of beer, a low sun, a warning lamp — more than it suits people.
1adjectiveamberOf a warm golden-orange colour.~27%
“The whole street turned amber under the street lights.”
synonyms: golden, orange
2nounmiddleThe middle light of a traffic light, meaning stop if you safely can.~10%
“The lights went to amber as we reached the junction.”
3nounfossilHard, clear, golden-orange resin from ancient trees, the kind museums keep with an insect caught inside it.~63%
“The museum has a beetle set in a lump of amber.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 168 sentences found in the wild and placed 68 of them on a sense (100 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Arabic ʿanbar named ambergris, the waxy grey stuff that washes ashore from whales and was burned for its scent. Old French took it as aumbre and English as amber — and along the way the name slid off the grey substance and onto the yellow tree resin found on the same beaches. Ambergris kept the old meaning. Amber walked off with a new one.
pal
𐭠𐭭𐭡𐭫 — ambergris
Arabic
عَنْبَر — ambergris
Old French
aumbre
Middle English
ambre
English, today
amber
From Middle English ambre, aumbre, from Old French aumbre, ambre, from Arabic عَنْبَر (“ambergris”), from pal 𐭠𐭭𐭡𐭫 (“ambergris”). Compare English lamber, ambergris. Displaced Middle English smulting (from Old English smelting (“amber”)), Old English eolhsand (“amber”), Old English glær (“amber”), and Old English sāp (“amber, resin, pomade”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA