Kilo Lingo

#533 of 5,000 Core 1000

Translation

colour; complexion; outward appearance

Examples

mutatur.

The colour of the sky is changing.

.

Flowers have many colours.

.

The garment was black in colour.

.

I see no colour.

.

I do not know the name of the colour.

Color, coloris is a third declension masculine. Older texts spell the nominative colos, which explains the r everywhere else: the stem was colos-, and an s between two vowels turned into an r in early Latin. Honor, honoris and arbor, arboris did the same thing.

Beyond pigment it covers complexion - colorem mutare is to go pale or flush - and the general look of a thing. Rhetoricians use it for the gloss put on an awkward case, which is exactly the modern sense of "putting a colour on it". The word is usually connected with celo, "to conceal", colour being what covers a surface. British English keeps the u from French colour; the Latin has none, so do not let the spelling drift when you write coloris.

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color: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 11.