Beige

How to spell beige

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beige

What does beige mean?

1. nounA pale, sandy fawn colour, between light brown and cream.
2. adjectiveHaving a pale sandy fawn colour.

Beige in a sentence

• noun

  The living room walls were painted a warm beige to keep the space neutral.

• adjective

  He wore a beige raincoat over his dark suit.

• noun

  She chose a beige handbag because it matched almost every outfit.

• adjective

  The office furniture was uniformly beige and rather dull.

Where does beige come from?

Language of origin: French

Beige came into English from French in the middle of the 1800s, where it described the natural, undyed colour of raw wool. The French word itself probably grew out of an older regional term for cloth left in its natural off-white or greyish-brown state, and some scholars connect it to the Old French bege used for that same unbleached fabric. As the word travelled into English fashion and decorating vocabulary it shifted from naming the material to naming the soft, pale sandy colour itself. The spelling preserves its French shape entirely, which is the heart of the trap: the 'ei' is sounded as a long 'ay', and the word closes on the soft 'ge' that gives the French 'zh' buzz rather than a hard English 'g'. Because English speakers rarely meet the 'ei = ay' pattern, many writers reach for 'beidge' or 'baige' instead. The deeper origin before French is uncertain, so the trail goes cold there.

How the word is built

• beige (unanalysable root borrowed whole from French; no prefix or suffix)