Yellow

How to spell yellow

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce yellow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does yellow mean?

1. adjectiveOf the bright colour of lemons, ripe bananas, or gold.
2. nounThe colour seen between green and orange in the spectrum.
3. verbTo become or make yellow, often through age or fading.

Yellow in a sentence

• adjective

  She painted the kitchen walls a warm yellow to brighten the room.

• noun

  The designer chose a soft yellow for the company logo.

• verb

  Old newspapers tend to yellow after years in a damp attic.

• adjective

  The taxi was a vivid yellow that stood out in traffic.

• noun

  Deep yellow is her favourite shade for autumn clothing.

• verb

  The hot sun can yellow the pages of a paperback left on the windowsill.

Where does yellow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Yellow descends from the Old English word geolu, which simply named the bright colour of gold, egg yolks, and ripe grain. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic colour words, with close relatives in Dutch geel and German gelb, and it ultimately traces back to a prehistoric root meaning 'to shine' or 'gleam' that also gave us the words 'gold' and 'gall'. Over the centuries the spelling drifted from geolu through Middle English forms such as yelou and yelwe before settling into the modern 'yellow'. By the later medieval period it was firmly the standard English name for the colour. The figurative use meaning 'cowardly' is much younger, an American colloquialism of the nineteenth century, probably from the idea of a pale, bloodless complexion associated with fear.

How the word is built

• yellow (from Old English geolu, a colour term); no productive prefix or suffix