Learn About Colours

Colour is everywhere! Look around you. How many colours can you see? Do you know the names of colours in English? Do you know how to spell the colours properly? Here is a colour chart* to help you with some of the most common colours. The first 7 colours on the wheel are the colours of the rainbow.

Listen to the pronunciation...

1. red
2. orange
3. yellow
4. green
5. blue
6. indigo
7. violet
8. purple
9. pink
10. silver
11. gold
12. beige
13. brown
14. grey / gray
15. black
16. white

* These colours may look slightly different on some computers.

How to use colour in a sentence

There are three different ways to describe the colour of something:

  1. My dad's car is red.
  2. The red car is my dad's.
  3. Red is the colour of my dad's car.
In British English we write colour. In American English we write color.

Shades

Colours have different shades. You can have:

dark green, light green, bright green

When you aren't exactly sure how to describe a colour you can use the suffix -ish. Native speakers often use -ish to describe colours! For example, a colour can be:

purplish, reddish, blueish

If you love these colours, you will enjoy learning many more colours in English. There are so many fun ones to learn. Colours are often named after things they remind us of. For example:

shell pink, navy blue, salmon

Now learn how to remember the colours, and then try this colours quiz.