Other forms: reds
Red is the colour of blood and ripe tomatoes. Painted red, a red car, red hair.
It is the longest visible wavelength, at the opposite end of the spectrum from violet. It carries meaning almost everywhere it appears: stop, danger, debt — in the red — and in some cultures luck and celebration. Red hair is not red. Note red tape, meaning bureaucratic obstruction, from the ribbon used to tie legal documents; a red herring, meaning a misleading distraction; and see red, meaning to become suddenly furious.
1nounredThe colour of blood and ripe tomatoes.~36%
“The whole front door is red and has been since 1971.”
2adjectivecolourOf that colour.~64%
“She drove a red van for about twenty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
red is a colour.
Old English read descends from a Proto-Indo-European root that shows up right across the family: Latin ruber, Greek erythros, Sanskrit rudhira. Red is one of the very few colour words reconstructible to the parent language.
Middle English
red
English, today
red
From Middle English red. 2 See also West Frisian read, Low German root, rood, rot, rod, Dutch rood, German rot, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål rød, Norwegian Nynorsk raud, Swedish röd, Faroese reyður, Icelandic rauður; also Welsh rhudd, Latin ruber, rufus, xto rtär, txb ratre, Ancient Greek ἐρυθρός, Albanian pruth (“redhead”), Russian ру́дый (rúdyj) ("red", "redhaired"). Czech rudý, Lithuanian raúdas, Finnish rauta, Estonian raud, Serbo-Croatian riđ ("reddish", "red"), ae 𐬭𐬀𐬊𐬌𐬛𐬌𐬙𐬀, Sanskrit रुधिर (“red, bloody”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA