Khaki is a dusty yellow-brown, the colour of army cloth. Khaki uniform, dressed in khaki, khaki trousers.
British troops in India dyed white uniforms with mud and tea to stop being shot at, and the colour was adopted officially in the nineteenth century — the first modern camouflage. The word is Urdu and Persian for dusty, from the word for earth.
1adjectivekhakiA dusty yellow-brown colour.
“He wore khaki shorts and a white T-shirt on holiday.”
khaki is a colour.
From Urdu and Persian khaki, dusty or earth-coloured, from khak, earth or dust.
fa-cls
خَاکِی — dusty, earthy, earth-colored
English, today
khaki
inc-hnd خاکی / ख़ाकी, from fa-cls خَاکِی (“dusty, earthy, earth-colored”). British person was coined in reference to the colour of the uniform of British troops during the Second Boer War; compare rooinek.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA