Purple

How to spell purple

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce purple

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does purple mean?

1. nounA colour made by mixing red and blue, traditionally associated with royalty and luxury.
2. adjectiveHaving the colour purple.

Purple in a sentence

• noun

  The bruise on her arm slowly faded from purple to yellow.

• adjective

  She wore a purple scarf to the office party.

• noun

  He chose a deep purple for the bedroom walls.

• adjective

  The garden was full of purple lavender in the summer.

Where does purple come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word purple traces back to the Latin purpura, which named both the costly violet-red dye of antiquity and the marine shellfish (a species of murex) from which that dye was painstakingly extracted. Latin in turn borrowed it from the Greek porphura, the same word for the dye-yielding mollusc. Because the dye was so expensive, the colour became a mark of emperors and high office, which is why we still speak of being 'born to the purple'. Old English took the word as purpul, and an interesting quirk of pronunciation called dissimilation turned the second 'r' of the Latin form into an 'l', giving us the modern spelling with its -ple ending rather than the -pre you might expect from the root. The Greek root also survives in the mineral name porphyry and the medical term porphyria, both still carrying that original shellfish-dye sense.

How the word is built

• purpl- (from Latin purpura, the purple dye/shellfish)
• -e