yellow

US/ˈjɛloʊ/

nounA13 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,014 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: yellows, yellowing

Yellow is the colour of lemons, butter and the sun. Bright, warm and very hard to miss.

It is among the first colours anyone learns, and it does a great deal of work beyond describing things: a yellow card is a warning, yellow lines at the kerb mean no parking, and yellow is the colour of caution on almost every sign in the world. It doubles as an adjective and as a verb, since paper yellows with age. There is an older use meaning cowardly, as in a yellow streak, which now sounds dated.

Definitions of yellow

1nounyellowThe colour of lemons and of the sun.A1~42%
“She painted the door a bright yellow.”
2adjectivecolourOf that colour.A1~56%
“He wore a yellow raincoat.”
3verbturnTo turn yellow with age.B2~2%
“The pages had yellowed at the edges.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Yellow and green come from a single Proto-Indo-European root that covered both. The languages that inherited it did not draw the line where we now draw it.

Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰelh₃-
Middle English
yelow
English, today
yellow

Built from

*ǵʰelh₃- · Proto-Indo-European — green, yellow

From Middle English yelow. From Middle English yelow, from Old English ġeolwe, oblique form of Old English ġeolu, from Proto-West Germanic gelu, from Proto-Germanic gelwaz, from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰelh₃wós, from ǵʰelh₃- (“green, yellow”). Cognate with Scots yella (“yellow”), frr gööl, güül (“yellow”), stq jeel (“yellow”), West Frisian giel (“yellow”), cim gel, ghéel (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”), nds-nl gael, gel (“yellow”), German gelb, gehl (“yellow”), German Low German gel, geel, gęl, gäl (“yellow”), lb giel (“yellow”), wym gaoł (“yellow”), Yiddish געל, געלב (“yellow”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish gul (“yellow”), Faroese and Icelandic gulur (“yellow”). Compare also Welsh gell (“bay, tawny”), Latin helvus (“dull yellow”), Irish geal (“white, bright”), Lithuanian žalias (“green”), Ancient Greek χλωρός (“light green”), Persian زرد (“yellow”), Sanskrit हरि (“greenish-yellow”), Russian жёлтый (“yellow”), Russian зелёный (“green”). Not related to Italian giallo—see galbinus.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colors, Shapes & Numbers, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

yellow in the wild

In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever recurs, abdominal pain occurs and liver damage begins, causing yellow skin.
Yellow fever
In 2013, yellow fever was estimated to have caused 130,000 severe infections and 78,000 deaths in Africa.
Yellow fever
In the RGB color model, used to create colors on television and computer screens, yellow is a secondary color made by combining red and green at equal intensity.
Yellow
In the 20th century, Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were forced to wear a yellow star.
Yellow
Cultivars of the plant produce fruits in different colors, including red, yellow, orange, green, white, and purple.
Bell pepper

1 / 3

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.

Definitions of yellow

1nounyellowThe colour of lemons and of the sun.A1~42%

“She painted the door a bright yellow.”

2adjectivecolourOf that colour.A1~56%

“He wore a yellow raincoat.”

3verbturnTo turn yellow with age.B2~2%

“The pages had yellowed at the edges.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.