Other forms: whites
White is the lightest colour, the colour of snow and fresh paper. Painted white, a white shirt, white as a sheet.
In physics white light is all the visible wavelengths together, which is why a prism splits it into the spectrum. In printing, white is the absence of ink and in light it is the sum of all colours, which is why mixing paint and mixing light give opposite results. White also refers to people of European descent, capitalised or not depending on the style guide. Note white lie, white flag, whitewash, and white noise.
1nounwhiteThe lightest colour, the colour of snow.~33%
“The whole room is white and shows every mark.”
2adjectivecolourOf that colour.~67%
“The snow made everything white, from the roofs to the cars.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
white is a colour.
Old English hwit descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning bright, which also gives wheat — named for the pale flour. Whitby, Whitehall and every other Whit- place name comes from the same word.
Middle English
whit
English, today
white
Built from
From Middle English whit. Middle English whit, hwit, from Old English hwīt, from Proto-West Germanic hwīt, from Proto-Germanic hwītaz, from Proto-Indo-European ḱweydós, a byform of ḱweytós (“bright; shine”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA