“Red and yellow and pink and green…” Spanish colour words, meaning & grammar (1/4)

An overview of some basic colour words in Spanish, showing what they mean and how they work. (Skip to after the first picture, if you’re in a hurry. If you’re into “slow reading”, please read on…) The last Plantagenet English monarch, Richard III, suffered multiple indignities after being slain at the Battle of Bosworth: stripped of its armour, his naked body (cuerpo desnudo) was slung unceremoniously across the back of a horse, and then some peasant stabbed him in the bum (culo) with a dagger (un puñal) as a final insult. (The Age of Chivalry, ¡Un jamón!) Worse still, when they got him to Leicester, he was buried in an anonymous car park, before being cartoon-villained by Shakespeare, who at least spared him the indignity of mentioning his rather downmarket and very unregal municipal last resting place.

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However, Ricardo found posthumous redemption of a sort by being immortalized centuries later (siglos después) in a schoolboy mnemonic for the colours of the rainbow (el arco iris):

Richard	Of	York	Gave	Battle	In	Vain
red	orange	yellow	green	blue	indigo	violet

There is no analogous mnemonic in Spanish, and in any case “indigo” is not a colour (un color) much in use. But the corresponding colours that are more or less useful go like this:

red	orange	yellow	green	blue	violet
rojo	naranja	amarillo	verde	azul	violeta

It’s an obvious fact of language that colours do not necessarily have the same symbolic meaning (significado) or connotations in every language: for English speakers red means danger (peligro), for Chinese speakers it means good fortune (la suerte). What follows highlights some of the similarities and differences between Spanish and English when it comes to the most common colour words. And there’s an ever so easy self-test at the end. Rojo shares the consonant r and many associations with English red. For example, someone with pelo rojo has red hair, and the two words combine to make un pelirrojo / una pelirroja, “a redhead.” If you’re finding it hard to visualize a pelirrojo, think of that famous royal bachelor (soltero) Prince Harry (el príncipe Henrique). During the Cold War (la Guerra Fría), Soviets, communists, and sympathizers might be referred to colloquially as rojos, which was also the term Francoists used during the Civil War to demonize Republicans. Someone who is extremely embarrassed turns red “as a tomato”, not a beetroot: Basta¹ mirarle² para que³ se le ponga⁴ la cara⁵ como⁶ un tomate⁷. “You’ve only got to look at him and he goes as red as a beetroot”.¹ And beware: for wine you use a different word: red wine is vino tinto. Naranja. As in English, you use the same word for the citrus fruit orange and the colour, but a fruit is una naranja whereas the colour is el naranja, because all colours are masculine. Both the English and Spanish words ultimately come from Arabic nāranj , but the n at the beginning dropped off somewhere on the way to English, while Spanish kept it.

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Certain colours adjectives like naranja never change to match the noun they go with: un pantalón naranja, una blusa naranja, dos blusas naranja. Such “invariable” adjectives can be used on their own, but are just as often preceded by color or de color:  una camisa color naranja/beige, una camisa de color naranja/beige.

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Amarillo. Unlike the previous two, there seems nothing to connect this word and English yellow. Perhaps the double ll in both might help you to make the connection. In Spanish, you talk about the  la prensa amarilla, literally the “yellow press”, meaning “the gutter press.” Amarillo also has a negative meaning – just like English yellow = “cowardly” – when talking about “yellow unions” that represent employers’ rather than workers’ interests, los sindicatos amarillos. To say the word, put the song “Is this the Way to Amarillo” right out of your mind. You pronounce that double ll as a sort of y, to give a-ma-ree-yo.

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Verde. Apart from being the title of a famous Lorca poem, “Verde que te quiero verde”, startlingly, for English speakers, you use the word for green in the phrase un viejo verde, “a dirty old man” and un chiste verde, “a dirty joke”. The association of verde / green with ecology is the same in both languages, as is the link with jealousy: estar verde de invidia “to be green with envy”. If you want a connection with English, think verdant.  Verde ends with an –e. Adjectives ending in any vowel other than –o have no feminine form, but they do have a plural, i.e. verdes. There is a famous flamenco song or copla about a woman who spends a night of passion with a man with green eyes: Ojos verdes, verdes como la albahaca.                                  Green eyes, green like basil. Verdes como el trigo verde                                                        Green like unripe corn y el verde, verde limón.                                                               And green, green lemons. Ojos verdes, verdes, con brillo de faca                                    Green green eyes, that gleam like a knife que estan clavaito en mi corazón.                                            And have stuck in my heart. And here’s the renowned flamenco singer the late Rocío Jurado giving a wonderfully over-the-top theatrical (teatral) rendition. Not for nothing was she nicknamed La más grande (“The Greatest”). Azul. Just as in English, aristocrats are supposed to have blue blood: veinte familias de sangre azul “twenty aristocratic families” (literally “families of blue blood”). Presumably in the same vein, someone’s príncipe azul is their “Prince Charming” or “knight in shining armour,” or even “Mr Right.” As a cynic blogged: Las mujeres se pasan la mitad de su vida buscando a su príncipe azul, para terminar casándose con un amable fontanero. “Women spend half their lives looking for Mr Right only to end up marrying a nice plumber.” Just like verde, azul is one of those unreconstructed chauvinist adjectives that have no feminine, but do change for the plural, e.g. Scandinavians stereotypically have ojos azules. This rule about adjectives not having a feminine but having a plural applies to almost all adjectives ending, like azul, in a consonant, e.g. un chico/una chica joven, un trabajo/una pregunta fácil, “a young boy/girl”, “an easy job/question”.

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¹The word-for-word translation is: “It is enough¹ to look at him² so that³ it to him becomes⁴ the face⁵ like⁶ a tomato⁷”.

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Autotest 1. Match the Spanish phrase to the English.

a.       The Red Planet	los Verdes
b.      A red alert	de sangre azul
c.       blue-blooded	el Planeta Rojo
d.      an orange shirt	El Ángel Azul
e.      the Greens	una camisa naranja
f.        The Blue Angel	una alerta roja

2. ¿Verdadero o falso? a. The English word orange is from Dutch. b. All adjectives in Spanish change to match the noun they go with. c. “Red wine” is vino tinto. d. “Amarillo” as sung in “Is this the way to Amarillo” is the correct Spanish pronunciation. e. All Spanish colour words are masculine. f. The feminine of verde is verda.