Pink

How to spell pink

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pink

What does pink mean?

1. adjectiveOf a pale red colour, like that made by mixing red with white.
2. nounThe pale red colour itself, or a shade of it.

Pink in a sentence

• adjective

  She painted the nursery a soft pink shade.

• noun

  The chart used a deep pink to mark the warmest regions.

• adjective

  The sky turned a faint pink at sunrise.

• noun

  Her favourite pink ran throughout the wedding decorations.

Where does pink come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The colour name pink is surprisingly recent and a little mysterious. Before it meant a colour, 'pink' was the English name of a garden flower, the Dianthus, recorded from the 1500s; people spoke of the colour of the pinks long before 'pink' became a colour word in its own right around the late 1600s. One popular idea links the flower name to the verb 'to pink', meaning to cut or pierce a decorative zigzag edge (still alive in 'pinking shears'), because the flower's petals look as if their edges have been notched; that verb itself may come from a Germanic root for stabbing or pricking. There is also a likely connection to Dutch 'pinck oogen', meaning small or half-shut eyes, which gave English the now-rare 'pink' for something small. Because the trail runs through flower names, cutting tools and Dutch borrowings, scholars are not fully certain which strand came first. The spelling, at least, gives little trouble: it is short, phonetic and unchanged across English.

How the word is built

• pink (single root; no affixes)