Colour idioms across languages

Same colour, different meaning

Blue shows the range. In English it means sad. In German, blau sein is to be drunk and blaumachen is to skip work. In French, une peur bleue is a terrible fright. In Spanish, a príncipe azul, a blue prince, is Prince Charming. Yellow varies as much. French rire jaune and Brazilian Portuguese sorriso amarelo both describe a strained, unwilling laugh or smile. In Italian a giallo is a crime novel, after the yellow covers of a series first published in 1929. In English, yellow has long meant cowardly.

Asia and Africa

In Chinese, to wear a green hat means that a man's wife has been unfaithful, which is why green hats make poor gifts in China. Red stands for luck and success, and a person who is popular is said to be red. In Japanese, aonisai, a blue two-year-old, is an inexperienced youth, much as English uses green. In Hindi, to go lal-peela, red and yellow, is to be furious, and kala dhan, black money, is undeclared income. Swahili uses colour words sparingly and builds many colours by comparison, such as rangi ya machungwa, the colour of oranges.

Where the sayings come from

Some idioms come from the body. People do flush red with anger and turn pale with fear, which is why those pairings recur around the world. Others come from history. To be in the red or in the black comes from the ink colours of account books. Blue blood is a translation of the Spanish sangre azul, said of noble families whose pale skin showed blue veins. White elephant comes from the sacred and costly animals of the royal courts of Siam. Translators usually have to swap the image for a local one.

Sources and further reading

• Color term on Wikipedia
• Duden: blaumachen
• Treccani, Vocabolario: giallo
• Online Etymology Dictionary: blue