ochre

UK/ˈəʊkə/US/ˈoʊkɚ/

adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Ochre is a dull yellow-brown earth colour. Painted in ochre.

It is a natural clay coloured by iron and is the oldest pigment humans have used. Ochre appears in cave paintings forty thousand years old and in modern paint tins.

Definitions of ochre

1adjectiveochreA dull yellow-brown earth colour.C1
“The whole wall was ochre and had been for two centuries.”

ochre is a colour.

Where it comes from

Greek ochra means pale yellow, from ochros, pale.

Ancient Greek
ὤχρα — pale yellow
Latin
ōchra
Old French
ocre
English, today
ochre

Built from

ὠχρός · Ancient Greek — pale, ocher

2010 From Old French ocre and its source Latin ōchra, from Ancient Greek ὤχρα (“pale yellow”), from ὠχρός (“pale, ocher”) (modern Greek ωχρός).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colours & Patterns

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ochre in the wild

The subspecies of the Caribbean coast of Mexico, I. s. fuertesi, is sometimes considered a separate species, the ochre oriole or Fuertes's oriole.
Orchard oriole
Adult males have chestnut or ochre underparts, while adult females and juveniles have olive-green upper parts and yellowish breasts and bellies.
Orchard oriole
One of the former ochre quarries can be visited via the "Sentier des Ocres" (Ochre Path), a walk of either 30 or 60 minutes through the old workings.
Roussillon, Vaucluse
There are five caves in total which contain the most extensive and accessible yellow ochre workings in the Mendip Hills.
Banwell Ochre Caves
The caves were first exploited for ochre mining in the 1930s and worked until 1948.
Banwell Ochre Caves

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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.

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