yellow

Etymology

From Middle English yelwe, yelou, from Old English ġeolwe, oblique form of Old English ġeolu, from Proto-West Germanic *gelu, from Proto-Germanic *gelwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃wos, from *ǵʰelh₃- (“gleam, yellow”). Compare Welsh gwelw (“pale”), Latin helvus (“dull yellow”), Irish geal (“white, bright”), Italian giallo (“yellow”) Lithuanian žalias (“green”), Ancient Greek χλωρός (khlōrós, “light green”), Persian زرد (zard, “yellow”), Sanskrit हरि (hari, “greenish-yellow”), Russian жёлтый (žóltyj, “yellow”), Russian зелёный (zeljónyj, “green”). Cognate with German gelb (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”). The verb is from Old English ġeolwian, from the adjective.

adj

1. Having yellow as its color.
   There's a one-eyed yellow idol / To the north of Kathmandu; / There's a little marble cross below the town; / And a brokenhearted woman / Tends the grave of 'Mad' Carew, / While the yellow god for ever gazes down. 1911, J. Milton Hayes, The green eye of the little yellow god
   dorrẹ̅, dōrī adj. & n. […] Golden or reddish-yellow […] (a. 1398) *Trev. Barth. 59b/a: ȝelouȝ colour [of urine] […] tokeneþ febleness of hete […] dorrey & citrine & liȝt red tokeneþ mene. 1962 (quoting c. 1398 text), Hans Kurath & Sherman M. Kuhn, editors, Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, ISBN 978-0-472-01044-8, page 1242
2. (informal) Lacking courage.
   You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you! 1975, Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
3. (publishing, journalism) Characterized by sensationalism, lurid content, and doubtful accuracy.
   The denizens of the gossipy world of the pink press, purple prose and yellow tabloids are shivering over disputed photographs of Princess Caroline of Monaco. 4 Oct 2004, Doreen Carvajal, “Photo edict muffles gossipy press”, in International Herald Tribune, retrieved 2008-07-29
4. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Of the skin, having the colour traditionally attributed to Far East Asians, especially Chinese.
5. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Far East Asian (relating to Asian people).
   Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. 1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
   The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp. 1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 516
6. (dated, Australia, offensive) Of mixed Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry.
   "Eh, Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?". 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter VI, in Capricornia, page 64
   A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me. “Give us a drink, yeller feller.” 1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins, published 2001, page 74
7. (dated, US) Synonym of high yellow
   Charley threw her over for a yellow gal named Nancy: he never forgave Vashti for the vanishing from his life of a menace that had come to mean more to him than Vashti herself. September 9 1933, James Thurber, “My Life and Hard Times—VI. A Sequence of Servants”, in The New Yorker
8. (UK politics) Related to the Liberal Democrats.
   March 2 2012, Andrew Grice, “Yellow rebels take on Clegg over NHS 'betrayal'”, in The Independent:
   yellow constituencies
9. (politics) Related to the Free Democratic Party; a political party in Germany.
   the black-yellow coalition

noun

1. The colour of gold, cheese, or a lemon; the colour obtained by mixing green and red light, or by subtracting blue from white light.
   It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
2. (US) The intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights, the illumination of which indicates that drivers should stop short of the intersection if it is safe to do so.
3. (snooker">snooker) One of the colour balls used in snooker">snooker, with a value of 2 points.
4. (pocket billiards) One of two groups of object balls, or a ball from that group, as used in the principally British version of pool that makes use of unnumbered balls (the (yellow(s) and red(s)); contrast stripes and solids in the originally American version with numbered balls).
5. (sports) A yellow card.
   Andrew Surman fired in what proved to be a 37th-minute winner before Forest's Paul Konchesky saw red late on. That second yellow for the loan signing came in stoppage time and did not affect the outcome of a game which Norwich dominated. April 15, 2011, Saj Chowdhury, “Norwich 2 - 1 Nott'm Forest”, in BBC Sport
6. Any of various pierid butterflies of the subfamily Coliadinae, especially the yellow coloured species. Compare sulphur.

verb

1. (intransitive) To become yellow or more yellow.
   Then suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows in from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York: Review Books, published 2006, page 47
   Interviews, clippings, yellowing stories from foreign newspapers, notebooks with old scribblings. Salisbury called it the debris of a reporter always too much on the run to sort out the paper, but there it was, an investigator's dream, […] 2013, Robert Miraldi, Seymour Hersh, Potomac Books, Inc., page 187
2. (transitive) To make (something) yellow or more yellow.