Different words for orange the color
#DIFFERENT WORDS FOR ORANGE THE COLOR SKIN#
To the French eye, when you get too cold your skin turns violet rather than blue. Violet - Purpleīe careful not to confuse this with pourpre (see the following) these aren’t synonyms in French. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not green as you would be in English, but rather are considered un bleu. You can also ask for un steak bleu, which means that your meat will barely touch the pan. Les Bleus is used to refer to French national sporting teams, such as the national soccer team. Most compellingly, un bleu is what you might get after being punched in the face (a bruise). un citron vert - a lime (these are rather unpopular and can be hard to find in France compared to their yellow cousins les citrons, or lemons)īleu ( pronunciation) has a few fun popular tasks in addition to its day job as an indicator of color.le Parti Vert / Les Verts- the Green Party.avoir le feu vert- to have the go-ahead/green light.manger du vert- to eat vegetation (animals).une politique verte - a green/ecological policy.le fruit est encore vert- the fruit isn’t ripe yet.Here’s a short sampling of the most common uses: Vert - GreenĪs with English equivalent, vert ( pronunciation here) gets laden with all sorts of different symbolism and can thus be of use in many situations. Un jaune d’œuf (literally, yellow of egg) is an egg yolk.Īs a noun, jaune is an offensive term for an Asian person as well as a scab, in the sense of somebody who goes to work during a strike. One of the most important uses of jaune ( pronunciation) is in Le Tour de France the leader in the race wears the maillot jaune, or yellow jersey. The lovely verb rougir means to turn red (in any sense), including to blush. être dans le rouge - to be in the red (accounting).Here are a few other quite easy parallels to English: People like me who are rather carefree oenophiles will simply order un verre de rouge (a glass of red) in any French bar, to indicate that we could care less if it is from Bourgogne, Bordeaux, or what have you. Rouge ( pronunciation here) is the color of the communists and can work as both a noun to describe such a person or an adjective to describe a viewpoint.
Red gets all kinds of uses and associations in English, so it shouldn’t surprise you that the same is true in French. (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.
#DIFFERENT WORDS FOR ORANGE THE COLOR PDF#
This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy. In this post, I’ll go over the words for colors in French, as well as the most common ways that you’ll likely encounter them in your kaleidoscopic French life. 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? Ap11 Basic French Colors… and Beyond: The Multicolored Expressions You Probably Never Learned