Other forms: mellows, mellowed, mellowing
Mellow is soft and warm and rounded, with the sharp edges worn off. Evening light on a brick wall. A low voice on late-night radio. A cheese kept long enough to lose its bite.
The word started with fruit and still works there: a mellow pear is ripe and sweet, and wine goes mellow after years in the bottle. From fruit it moved to sound and colour, and then to people — somebody who was fierce at thirty and is mellow at sixty has softened in exactly the same way. It is a verb too: age mellows most of us, and mellow out means calm down, which is informal and mostly American. Mind the praise it carries. Calling a person mellow is kind; calling their work mellow can mean it has no edge left at all.
1adjectivetasteSoft and rounded in sound, light or colour, with nothing harsh in it.~52%
“A mellow gold light filled the room.”
2adjectiverelaxedCalm and unhurried, especially after years of being neither.~5%
“He has grown mellow since the children were born.”
synonyms: relaxed, easy-going
3adjectivemellowSmooth and full in taste, from ripeness or from age.~5%
“A mellow cheese that has been kept for two years.”
4verbbecomeTo become gentler or smoother as time passes.~38%
“The wine mellows in oak for a year.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 61 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense (40 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
MELLOW → YELLOW
A banana left on the sunny kitchen window until it turns deep yellow and goes soft enough to press with your thumb. The radio is on, low and warm, and nothing in the room is in a hurry.
hooks ontoyellow
In Middle English, melowe meant ripe — juicy and sweet, said of fruit. Every other job the word does now, all the soft light and the soft voices and the calm people, grew out of that one picture of fruit ready to eat. Where melowe itself came from, nobody has settled.
Proto-Indo-European
*melh₂-
Middle English
melowe
English, today
mellow
Built from
The adjective is derived from Late Middle English melowe, melwe (“ripe, mellow; juicy; sweet”)melow, melowi; further etymology uncertain, possibly:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA