Colours - Colors

Vocabulary

There are many different names of colours in English.

Some of the more common colours are:

The colour Grey can also be written as Gray in the some countries.

The word Colour is written as Color in United States.

There are three ways that you can use a colour in a sentence to describe something:

1. To Be + Colour. e.g. My car is blue.

2. Colour + Noun. e.g. The blue car is mine.

3. Colour is the Noun. e.g. Blue is the colour of my car.

Did you know that, because colours give us more information about a person or a thing, they are all adjectives in English?

You can also talk in shades (or intensity) of colour in English by using such expressions as:

Light is the opposite of Dark.

Bright: a strong colour that is easy to see.

- Helen has dark green eyes.

- His light grey hair made him look very distinguished.

- Her bright pink lipstick doesn't look good.

The words Light, Dark and Bright are placed before the colour.

If you are not exactly sure how to describe a colour, we normally use the suffix -ish.

e.g. Greenish (= approximately green but not exactly green)

The sunset is a beautiful pinkish-purplish colour today.

His shirt is lightish blue in colour.

The following is a list of things typically associated with each colour:

Red: Strawberry, Rose, Fire engine, Blood

Orange: Pumpkin, Carrot, Basketball

Yellow: Cheese, Sun, Butter, Lemon

Green: Grass, Lettuce, Frog

Blue: Sky, Ocean, Blueberry

Black: Bat, Night, Tire

White: Paper, Sugar, Milk

Pink: Pig, Tongue, Cotton candy (Candy floss)

Brown: Wood, Cigar, Earth

Grey: Rock, Lead, Dust

How many more things can you add to each colour?

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Last Updated: 01 January 2009