Crimson

How to spell crimson

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crimson

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crimson mean?

1. adjectiveOf a deep, slightly purplish red colour.
2. nounA deep, slightly purplish red colour, or a dye or pigment of that colour.

Crimson in a sentence

• adjective

  The autumn maple leaves turned a deep crimson before they fell.

• noun

  The painter mixed a touch of white into the crimson to soften it.

• adjective

  She chose a crimson velvet sofa for the living room.

• noun

  The team's flag is a bold crimson with a gold border.

Where does crimson come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word traces back to qirmiz, the Arabic name for the kermes, a tiny scale insect whose dried bodies were crushed to make a brilliant red dye. From the adjective qirmizi, meaning 'of the kermes' or 'kermes-coloured', the term passed into Medieval Latin as cremesinus and into Old Spanish and Italian forms such as cremesino and cremisi. English picked it up in the early 1400s, and the spelling drifted through forms like cremesin and crimosin before settling on 'crimson'. The same insect-dye ancestor lies behind the word 'kermes' itself and is distantly connected to 'carmine', another deep red. Because the original root meant a specific dye source rather than a colour, the modern spelling keeps that unexpected 'm' and 's' pairing that catches writers who expect a more phonetic ending.

How the word is built

• crimson (a single root from Arabic qirmiz, the kermes insect that yielded the dye); no separable prefix or suffix in modern English