gold

UK/ɡəʊld/US/ɡoʊld/

nounA24 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #504 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: golds

Gold is the heavy yellow metal that never rusts and never dulls — rings, coins, a thin line round the rim of a plate, bars stacked in a vault. It is the colour of that metal too, and the medal you get for finishing first.

As an adjective it means made of the metal or coloured like it: a gold chain, gold paint, gold lettering on a black door. Golden is the softer, more figurative cousin, and the pair are easy to mix up — a gold watch is made of gold, a golden opportunity is not made of anything. Gold is weighed in ounces and measured in carats, and it has left a trail of phrases behind it: a heart of gold, as good as gold, worth its weight in gold, the gold standard, the gold rush.

Definitions of gold

1nounsoftThe soft, heavy yellow metal used for coins, rings and bars.A2~63%
“The ring is solid gold.”
2noungoldThe rich shining yellow of that metal.A2~13%
“The lettering on the door was painted in gold.”
3nounfirstA first-place medal.A2~16%
“She won gold in the 400 metres.”
4adjectivecolourMade of gold, or the colour of gold.A2~8%
“A thin gold chain hung at her throat.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 115 of them on a sense (25 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Also accepted in games: golden

Phrases it lives in

a heart of gold — a kind and generous nature
as good as gold — very well behaved, usually said of a child
worth its weight in gold — extremely useful or valuable
the gold standard — the best example of its kind, the one others are measured against

Also practised as

adjectiveA rich shining yellow, like the metal.

Where it comes from

Old English gold, and back through Germanic to a root meaning green or yellow — the same root that gave English yellow. Gold is named for its colour and nothing else: it is simply the yellow stuff, and the price came later.

Middle English
gold
English, today
gold

From Middle English gold. From Middle English gold, from Old English gold (“gold”), from Proto-West Germanic golþ, from Proto-Germanic gulþą (“gold”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰl̥h₃tóm (“gold”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰelh₃- (“green, yellow”). Related to yellow; see there for more. Germanic cognates include Scots gowd, Dutch goud, German Gold, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk gull, Danish and Swedish guld, and cognates from other Indo-European languages include Latvian zelts, Russian зо́лото, Persian زرد (“yellow, golden”), Sanskrit हिरण्य.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colors, Shapes & Numbers, Chemistry & Elements

Practise this word

gold in the wild

Chemically, gold is a transition metal, a group 11 element, and one of the noble metals.
Gold
In 2023, the world's largest gold producer was China, followed by Russia and Australia.
Gold
Historically, banking crises were more common during periods under the gold standard, while currency crises were less common.
Gold standard
The California gold rush was a gold rush in California, which began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W.
California gold rush
The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people from the rest of the United States and abroad to California, which had recently been conquered from Mexico.
California gold rush

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

Definitions of gold

1nounsoftThe soft, heavy yellow metal used for coins, rings and bars.A2~63%

“The ring is solid gold.”

2noungoldThe rich shining yellow of that metal.A2~13%

“The lettering on the door was painted in gold.”

3nounfirstA first-place medal.A2~16%

“She won gold in the 400 metres.”

4adjectivecolourMade of gold, or the colour of gold.A2~8%

“A thin gold chain hung at her throat.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 115 of them on a sense (25 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Also accepted in games: golden