(Note: orange is an invariable adjective, whereas orangé is not.) What we call a yellow stoplight is seen as orange in France: feu orange. Variants include orange brûlé (burnt orange) and the intentionally vaguer orangé (orangey). You can thus have jus d’orange (orange juice) at breakfast as well as marmelade d’orange(orange marmalade). This color ( pronounced here), as in English, is the name of the fruit as well. Note that it contrasts with the name of the wine, vin rosé, for which one does pronounce the last letter.īe aware that rose as an adjective is also used to describe things that are erotic/sexual, so a téléphone rose is not a pink telephone, but rather a phone sex service. The archetypical flower purchased on the streets of Paris for your lover is a red rose, not a pink one, so yes, there’s a strange discordance between the noun and the color adjective in French. Rose as a color adjective in French means “pink,” not the warmer crimsony color we Anglophones tend to think of when we use “rose” as a color.Īs a noun, however, une rose denotes the same flower as in English. To learn more color expressions, you can always browse through the FluentU library. (Download) 11 French Colors and Their Vibrant Matching Expressions
This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy. In this post we’ll cover the principal words for colors in French, as well as the most common ways that you’ll likely encounter them in your kaleidoscopic French life. Perhaps this song by Edith Piaf is already going through your head right now.īut we can make use of French colors to describe our everyday experiences, not just our rosiest moments in the arms of a Frenchman. Probably the most famous example of this is the French expression voir la vie en rose, which is literally “to see life in pink,” but whose meaning is more like our “to look at life through rose-tinted glasses” or “to look on the sunny side of things.”
I’ll do you one better: Learning French colors and the words used to describe them will allow you to convey a number of other feelings and experiences, while discovering a bit more about French culture too. Want to talk about the chromatic wonders that you see around you-in French? I hope this was helpful for you! And if it was, you might also enjoy my book Master Lists for Writers.Home » French Vocab and Grammar » 11 Basic French Colors… and Beyond: The Multicolored Expressions You Probably Never Learnedīy mosehayward 11 Basic French Colors… and Beyond: The Multicolored Expressions You Probably Never Learned
I may add more to this later! Pin or bookmark the page so you’ve got it when you need it!īlack as the screen of a computer turned offīlack as the movie screen after the final scene In some cases, the object being evoked may come in different colors, and that’s okay as long as you’re referring to the most standard color. We say “pitch black,” but few of us refer to “pitch” in that way otherwise (it’s a kind of tar.) We say “powder blue,” but what light blue powder is that referring to? “Brown as a berry” makes no sense at all.Ĭolor descriptions can even evoke the worldview of a character in a fantasy, science fiction, or historical novel, such as “white as the robe of a priestess” or “black as a model T Ford.” A few of the descriptions on the list are pretty specific to the United States. Some of the more common color descriptions and phrases are actually outdated and/or a bit weird. “Black as a moonless night” stirs up a little more mystery than “black as night.” “White as copier paper” is more evocative, and might be perfect if you’re writing about someone in an office setting.
Just adding a more specific word can make a description more striking.
Some of these suggest other qualities in addition to color, such as texture. Please note that many of these are not appropriate to use in describing a person’s skin color. Characters may still use clichés when they are speaking - sometimes, that’s just realistic dialogue. I’ve tried to list the more familiar or clichéd descriptions words for colors first and then the fresher ways to describe colors later. This is a list of color names as well as color descriptions that relate to specific objects.