Lesson 30 – Color

Today you’re going to expand your vocabulary by learning various collocations about colors.

You can describe a color as light or dark – for example, someone can have light brown or dark brown hair. If a color is very intense, you can describe it as bright – for example, a bright red apple. If the color is not very intense, you can describe it as pale – for example, a pale green dress.

When describing colors in general, you can talk about bold/vivid colors – which are very intense – or pastel colors, which are light or pale.

We can use other words to describe specific shades of a color (variations of a specific color). These words are usually a typical object with that particular color. For example, “sky blue” is a light shade of blue, like the color of the sky. Here are some of the most common collocations:

ruby red, cherry red, fiery orange, burnt orange, lemon yellow, golden yellow, emerald green, olive green, sky blue, royal blue, navy blue / midnight blue

When you have something that is primarily one color, but with a little bit of another color included, we can use the word “tinge.” There are two ways to structure the sentence:

The flowers are yellow with a tinge of pink in the middle.

My cat’s fur is light gray with a slight brownish tinge.

You can also use this form – a color word plus –ISH – to describe mixes of colors. For example, “reddish brown” is a shade of brown with a strong portion of red, whereas “yellowish brown” is a shade of brown with a strong portion of yellow.

Some colors look good together – in this case, we can say that the colors match. Other colors look terrible together – in this case, we can say that the colors clash. When the color of a person’s clothes looks good with that person’s skin tone (color of their skin), you can say “that color suits you” or “that color looks good on you.”

Finally, one tip about changing the color of something. We use the verb “paint” in most cases – you paint a house and paint your nails. But we use the verb “dye” for hair and cloth/fabric – so you dye your hair blonde and dye a shirt blue.