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magenta

UK/məˈd͡ʒɛntə/US/məˈd͡ʒɛntə/
adjectiveB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,862 of 15,258neutral

Magenta is a vivid purplish pink. A magenta dress, magenta ink, bright magenta.

It is one of the three inks in colour printing, alongside cyan and yellow, so almost every printed colour has some in it. Curiously it has no wavelength of its own — the eye makes it from red and blue with the green missing, so no rainbow contains magenta.

Basile Morin · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of magenta

  1. 1adjectivemagentaA vivid purplish pink.B1+

    “She wore bright magenta lipstick to the party.”

magenta is a colour.

Where it comes from

Named after the Battle of Magenta in 1859; a new aniline dye of that colour was named to mark the victory.

  1. Latin

    Castra Maxentia — the camp named Maxentia

  2. Italian

    Magenta

  3. French

    magenta

  4. English, today

    magenta

French magenta, from Italian Magenta, in commemoration of the Franco-Italian victory at the Battle of Magenta in 1859. An aniline dye in this colour had been invented the same year by French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin and was named in honour of the battle. The town's name derives from Latin Castra Maxentia (“the camp named Maxentia”), referring to the emperor Maxentius. Compare Castra Regina for a similar appositional use of a proper noun with castra.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colours & Patterns

Practise this word

magenta in the wild

  • The addition of black ink reduces ink consumption and produces more consistent dark tones compared to using cyan, magenta, and yellow alone.

    CMYK color model

  • The web color magenta is sometimes also called fuchsia.

    Magenta

  • The color magenta takes its name from the battle.

    Magenta, Lombardy

  • Rose is the color halfway between red and magenta, whose hue corresponds to an angle of 330 degrees on the HSV/HSL color wheel.

    Rose (color)

  • The color magenta has notable tints and shades.

    Shades of magenta

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.