Red

How to spell red

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce red

What does red mean?

1. adjectiveHaving the colour of blood or of a ripe tomato.
2. nounThe colour at the long-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, like blood or ripe strawberries.

Red in a sentence

• adjective

  She painted the front door a bright red before the party.

• noun

  A deep red dominated the autumn display in the gallery.

• adjective

  The traffic light turned red just as the bus reached the junction.

• noun

  The designer chose a warm red for the company logo.

Where does red come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Red is one of the oldest colour words in English, descending directly from the Old English read, which already named the warm hue of blood, fire, and autumn leaves. That word came from the Proto-Germanic raudaz, and beyond it from a very ancient Indo-European root reudh, meaning literally 'red' or 'ruddy', a root so stable that it survives across an enormous family of languages. The same ancestor gave Latin ruber and rufus, which lie behind English borrowings such as 'ruby', 'rubric', and 'rufous', and it also produced 'ruddy' and 'rust' in our own native vocabulary. The spelling settled early and stayed short and simple, so the only real trap is that the single short word sounds identical to 'read' in its past tense, a homophone clash that has nothing to do with how red is written. Because it has been a core everyday word for well over a thousand years, its form has barely changed since Anglo-Saxon times.

How the word is built

• red (from Old English read, a single unanalysable root; no prefix or suffix)