Reddish

How to spell reddish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reddish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reddish mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a colour that is somewhat red or tinged with red.

Reddish in a sentence

• Her hair turned a reddish shade in the summer sun.

• The evening sky had a warm reddish glow over the rooftops.

Where does reddish come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native English colour term 'red', which comes from Old English 'read', and the suffix '-ish', from Old English '-isc', meaning 'of the nature of' or 'somewhat'. The root 'read' descends from a very old Germanic colour word that also gave German 'rot' and the Latin 'ruber', all tracing back to a shared ancestral root meaning simply 'red'. The '-ish' suffix has long been used to soften an adjective into 'approximately' or 'tending toward', as in 'greenish' or 'tallish'. When the two join, the single 'd' of 'red' is doubled to 'reddish', following the regular English rule that a short stressed vowel keeps its sound by doubling the final consonant before a suffix. That doubling is the only real spelling trap here, since writers sometimes leave a single 'd' and produce the wrong 'redish'.

How the word is built

• red (the colour)
• -ish (suffix meaning 'somewhat' or 'tending toward'); the final consonant of red doubles before the suffix