Watercolor

How to spell watercolor

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce watercolor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does watercolor mean?

1. nounA paint made from pigment bound in a water-soluble medium, or a picture produced with such paint.
2. adjectiveRelating to or made with water-soluble paint.

Watercolor in a sentence

• noun

  She framed a delicate watercolor of the harbour at dawn.

• adjective

  The gallery devoted a whole room to watercolor landscapes.

• noun

  The art shop sells tubes of watercolor in every shade.

• adjective

  She prefers a watercolor technique for quick travel sketches.

Where does watercolor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound of the ordinary English word 'water' and 'color', the latter reaching English through Old French from the Latin 'color', meaning 'hue' or 'tint', which in turn was related to 'celare', 'to hide or cover', since colour was thought of as the surface coating over things. The term came together in the 1500s to describe pigments that are bound with a water-soluble medium rather than oil, and by extension the paintings made with them. The American spelling drops the 'u' of the older 'colour', following the broad nineteenth-century reforms popularised in the United States by Noah Webster, who preferred spellings closer to their Latin source. That is the single trap here: a fluent writer must remember the bare '-color' ending, since 'watercolour' is the form seen across British and Canadian media. The painting sense and the paint-medium sense have travelled together since the practice became a respected fine-art form in the 1700s and 1800s.

How the word is built

• water (the liquid)
• color (pigment/hue, from Latin color)

British and American spelling

Watercolor is the American spelling. British English spells it watercolour.