Colorful means full of many bright colours. A market stall, a parrot, a child's painting.
This is the American spelling, and British English adds a u to make colourful. The literal sense is plain enough, and the figurative one is where the word earns its keep, since a colorful character is lively and slightly disreputable, and a colorful past is one with some scandal in it. Colorful language is a polite way of saying swearing. That gentle irony runs through all three of them.
1adjectivecolorfulFull of bright colours.
“The stalls were colorful and noisy.”
2adjectivelivelyLively and interesting, often with a hint of scandal.
“He had a colorful career before settling down.”
Also accepted in games: colourful
Middle English
colour
English
color
English, today
colorful
From color + -ful. color comes from Middle English colour. From Middle English colour, color, borrowed from Anglo-Norman colur, from Old French colour, color, from Latin color. a doublet of couleur. Largely displaced English blee, Middle English blee (“color”), from Old English blēo. Also partially replaced Old English hīew (“color”) and its descendants (English hue), which is less often used in this sense.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Everyday Adjectives, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 13 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word