Coloring

How to spell coloring

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce coloring

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coloring mean?

1. nounThe act or activity of adding color to something, as with crayons, pencils, or dye.
2. nounThe natural color or general appearance of someone's skin, hair, or of an object.

Coloring in a sentence

• The children spent the rainy afternoon coloring in their activity books.

• The bird's bright coloring made it easy to spot among the leaves.

• She bought a fresh box of pencils just for coloring the illustrations.

• Her healthy coloring returned a few days after the illness passed.

Where does coloring come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin color, meaning a hue, tint, or outward appearance, a noun that some scholars link to celare, 'to cover or conceal', since a color is what covers a surface and hides what lies beneath. The Latin word passed into Old French as colour and entered English in the 1200s, where it long carried the spelling with the u. The American form coloring drops that u, following the reforms championed by Noah Webster in the early 1800s, who argued that the unpronounced letter served no purpose. The -ing ending is the ordinary English suffix that turns the verb 'to color' into a noun naming either the act of applying color or the colors something already has. The single trap for many writers is the same one that haunts color itself: deciding whether the u belongs, and in American usage it does not.

How the word is built

• color (from Latin color: hue, tint)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)

British and American spelling

Coloring is the American spelling. British English spells it colouring.