Colors in Chinese and what they mean

The basic colors in Chinese are 红色 hóngsè (red), 黄色 huángsè (yellow), 蓝色 lánsè (blue), 绿色 lǜsè (green), 白色 báisè (white) and 黑色 hēisè (black), and every one ends in the same syllable, 色 sè, "colour". Take it off and you have the colour on its own, 红, 黄, 蓝, which is how it goes in front of a noun. Several carry meanings that English colours do not: red is the colour of luck and celebration, white of mourning, yellow was the emperor's colour and is now also slang for pornography, and a man said to wear a green hat has been cheated on. Below are the words, how they work in a sentence, what each colour means in Chinese culture and where those meanings come from, and how often Chinese film and television subtitles say each one.

Updated 27 October 2026 · 15 min read

The colours in Chinese

The last column is how many times the colour is said per million words of Chinese film and television subtitles, counting the 色 form only; how that was counted, and what it misses, is further down.

The "say it" column is only a guide. 色 sè is a falling tone with a vowel like the one in "duh". The ü of 绿 lǜ is said with the tongue as for "ee" and the lips rounded, as in French tu. And the tones are part of each word: 红, 黄, 蓝 and 白 all rise, 黑 is high and level, and 绿 falls, as do 色 itself and 褐 hè. The four tones are set out in the Mandarin tones explained.

Brown has three words: 棕色 is "palm-fibre colour", 咖啡色 "coffee colour", and 褐色 is the third. Orange has two, 橙色 from 橙, "orange tree", and 橘色 from 橘, the tangerine.

How colour words work

色 means "colour", and 颜色 is the word for it. 颜色 is said yánsè. "What colour is it?" is 什么颜色？ Shénme yánsè? On its own, 色 also means "look" and "sex", which is where 色情 sèqíng, "pornography", comes from.

Without 色, a colour goes straight in front of a noun. A one-character adjective can modify a noun directly, with no 的 between them: 红衣服 hóng yīfu, "red clothes", 白猫 bái māo, "a white cat". Many fixed words are made this way: 红酒 hóngjiǔ is red wine, 红灯 hóngdēng a red light, 绿灯 lǜdēng a green one.

With 色, it usually takes 的. An adjective of two characters generally needs 的 before a noun, so "a red bicycle" is 红色的自行车 hóngsè de zìxíngchē.

"It is red" is 是 … 的. Most Chinese adjectives are joined to their noun with 很, not 是. Colours are an exception: the Chinese Grammar Wiki counts them among its "distinguishing words", words for a fixed category rather than a quality on a scale, which go into a sentence with 是 and usually 的. 这辆车是红色的。 Zhè liàng chē shì hóngsè de. "This car is red." The adjective with 的 can also stand in for the noun, like "the red one" in English: 我要红的。 Wǒ yào hóng de. "I want the red one."

Dark and light go in front. 深 shēn, "deep", makes a dark shade and 浅 qiǎn, "shallow", a light one: 深蓝色 is dark blue, 浅蓝色 light blue. Azure, "sky blue", is 天蓝色 tiānlánsè.

青: one word for green, blue and black

Older Chinese had a colour that does not fit English categories at all. 青 qīng covers green and blue and reaches into black, and it is still in the language. CC-CEDICT glosses it "green / blue / black / youth", and each sense lives on in a fixed word: 青菜 qīngcài is green vegetables, 青天 qīngtiān a clear blue sky, and 青丝 qīngsī fine black hair. 青花 qīnghuā is blue-and-white porcelain, and 青年 qīngnián, a young person, takes the sense "youth".

The linguist Victoria Bogushevskaya describes 青 as a composite category: it "not only denotes green-blue continuum, but also extends into the macro-black area of a colour space". She also notes that it is no longer a basic colour term: modern Chinese has separate everyday words for green (绿), blue (蓝) and black (黑). Jun Wang and Chenghui Guan, writing in Language and Semiotic Studies, call it "a very special and controversial color term", which can mean green, blue or black depending on the words around it, and sometimes none that anyone can name for certain. The two words that replaced it began as offshoots: Wei Bi traces 绿 and 蓝 as colour terms that grew out of 青 as colour naming became more precise, and CC-CEDICT still gives 蓝 the sense "indigo plant": in classical texts such as the Xunzi, Wei Bi notes, 蓝 named the plant the indigo dye was made from.

Linguists call a single green-blue category of this kind "grue", the word in the title of Bogushevskaya's paper. A traffic light, though, is 绿灯, with the modern word.

Colours in Chinese culture

These meanings are old, and most were written down in classical texts. Where they come from is set out here source by source; none of them is a rule that every Chinese speaker lives by.

The five colours and the five elements

In traditional Chinese thought, five colours were basic, and each was tied to one of the five phases, 五行 wǔxíng, and to a direction. In the scheme as Wei Bi summarises it in Roczniki Humanistyczne:

The seasons are the four Wei Bi gives for the four directions; earth, at the centre, has none of its own in that summary. Classical texts write red as 赤 chì, an older word for it. These five colours are often called 五色 wǔsè, "the five colours", though in modern Chinese 五色 more often just means "multicoloured". Note that metal's colour is white, not gold.

Red: luck, weddings, the New Year

Red, in Wei Bi's summary, is "associated with wealth, dignity and happiness". It is the colour for celebrations: weddings, the birth of a child and the New Year.

The best-known red object is the 红包 hóngbāo, the red packet of money. In a study of the custom, largely as it is kept in Hong Kong, Kin Wai Michael Siu traces it to the Ming dynasty, when parents put coins tied on a coloured string under their children's pillows on New Year's Eve. That money was called 压岁钱 yāsuìqián (CC-CEDICT: "money given to children as a gift on Chinese New Year's Eve"), and the coins were later wrapped in red cloth or red paper, then put in small red envelopes. Siu lists the occasions red packets are now given on: the New Year, birthdays, weddings, a first day at school or in a new job. They go from older to younger and from married to unmarried, and a younger person never gives one to an elder. 红包 can also mean a bonus, and also a kickback or a bribe.

Red is not lucky everywhere. Wei Bi notes that it was forbidden at funerals, and that because the registers of criminals were written with a red brush, writing a letter in red came to be avoided.

Red is also political. CC-CEDICT gives 红色 the sense "revolutionary", and 红军 Hóngjūn, the Red Army of 1928 to 1937, was the forerunner of the People's Liberation Army. 白色, white, has the opposite sense, "reactionary".

Bare 红 also means "popular": 走红 zǒuhóng is to become a hit.

White: mourning, and white weddings

White is the colour of mourning. Wei Bi calls a passage in the Classic of Poetry, the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, the earliest recorded use of white for mourning clothes. A funeral is 白事 báishì, "a white affair", and weddings and funerals together are 红白喜事 hóngbái xǐshì, "red and white happy events". Mourners wore white, and Wei Bi notes that white flowers and white clothes are still common at Chinese funerals.

That has not kept white out of weddings. The Western white wedding dress, as Yuling Li notes in a study of contemporary Chinese wedding dresses, "has crossed cultures and many modern Chinese women wear them on their wedding day". Traditional Chinese wedding dresses, such as the 秀禾服 xiùhéfú and the 龙凤褂 lóngfèngguà, have also come back since the end of the twentieth century.

Yellow: the emperor's colour, then pornography

Yellow belongs to earth and the centre, and that made it, in Wei Bi's account, "the colour of the imperial power". Yellow robes were reserved for the emperor, a rule Wei Bi dates most probably to the Sui dynasty and the early Tang. By the Qing, according to an anecdote collection Wei Bi quotes, only the emperor wore bright yellow; the crown prince wore an apricot yellow and other princes a duller golden yellow. Yellow roofs covered the Forbidden City and the other royal buildings of the Ming and Qing. The idiom 黄袍加身 huáng páo jiā shēn, "to have the yellow robe put on one", means to be made emperor; it recalls the mutiny of 960 in which soldiers draped one over the general who founded the Song dynasty.

In modern Chinese, yellow means something else as well. CC-CEDICT gives 黄色 the senses "vulgar; lewd; pornographic": a 黄片 huángpiàn is a pornographic film, and 扫黄 sǎohuáng, "sweeping away yellow", is a campaign against pornography. Wei Bi, citing the historians Huang and Chen, says the sense was not Chinese to begin with: it came from American "yellow journalism", reached China in the 1920s as a name for sensational news, and settled on pornography in the 1940s. Saohuang first appeared, by Wei Bi's account, in an essay of 1948.

Green: the green hat

戴绿帽子 dài lǜ màozi, "to wear a green hat", means that one's partner has been unfaithful. CC-CEDICT notes that it used to apply only to men, as "to be a cuckold", and lists a newer slang verb: bare 绿 lǜ, "to cheat on".

The phrase goes back to dress laws. The historian Matthew Sommer, in Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, describes laws in force from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century that required the men of households with prostitutes to wrap their heads in a green scarf. Wei Bi gives the same history in more detail: the statutes of the Yuan dynasty required prostitutes, and the parents and male relatives of entertainers, to wear 青 headscarves (the green-blue colour above), and in the Ming, entertainers and musicians wore green headbands. A 1935 history of prostitution in China, which Wei Bi quotes, records that a man who prostituted his wife or daughters came to be described as wearing a green headband or a green hat; from there it became the word for any man whose wife was unfaithful.

Black: respected once, shady now

Black was not always a dark colour in the bad sense. Wei Bi notes that it was highly respected under the Qin dynasty, whose flags were black, and that it stood for water, the north and winter. Today, Wei Bi writes, its meanings are mostly negative, and many words with 黑 describe wrongdoing: 黑社会 hēishèhuì is organised crime, 黑车 hēichē an unlicensed taxi, and 黑心 hēixīn, "a black heart", someone ruthless and without conscience. CC-CEDICT's gloss for 黑 runs to "sinister, secret, shady, illegal". Wei Bi adds that black is often avoided on festive days such as weddings, births and the New Year, as a reminder of death.

Gold

金 jīn is gold, and also metal in general and money; gold the metal is also 黄金 huángjīn, "yellow metal". 黄金 also means "prime", as in 黄金周 Huángjīn Zhōu, "Golden Week", the name of China's two week-long national holidays. Golden yellow, as above, was the colour of Qing princes.

Colour idioms

The meanings are CC-CEDICT's. Where English is green with envy, Chinese has red eyes: CC-CEDICT gives "green with envy" as one translation of 眼红, and 红眼病, literally "red-eye disease", is both conjunctivitis and envy.

Red for up, green for down

On the mainland Chinese stock market, a rising price is shown in red and a falling one in green, the opposite of the convention elsewhere, including on the Hong Kong market. CC-CEDICT has the words for it: 红盘 hóngpán is a share or index above the previous day's close, 绿盘 lǜpán one below it. The psychologist Feng Jiang and colleagues tested the effect in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making: mainland Chinese participants predicted stronger economic growth when the same figures were printed in red rather than green, and Hong Kong participants did the opposite.

Which colours do Chinese films say most?

We counted each colour in Chinese film and television subtitles, in its 色 form.

Red is first, at 41.5 times per million words, with blue second at 37.9, then black and white. Silver is last, at 4.0. Pink comes sixth, ahead of yellow. The word for "colour" itself, 颜色, is said more often than any single colour, 43.4 times per million words.

How these were counted, and what that cannot show:

• Only the 色 forms are counted. The list was cut into words before counting, and 红色 is a word of its own, so every 红色 and 红色的 is in the count. A colour said without 色 is not: a bare character is either a token of its own or part of a longer word, such as 红酒, that was not counted. Every figure is therefore an undercount.
• The bare characters cannot be counted as colours. Bare 黑 is said 71.4 times per million words, about twice as often as 黑色, but bare 黑 is also "dark", as when night falls, and the count cannot tell the senses apart. Bare 白 is also "in vain", "free of charge" and the surname Bai; 黄 is also the surname Huang; and bare 金, at 64.4, is also gold the metal, money and the surname Jin, so it says little about the colour.
• 黄色 includes the other yellow. Some of its count is "pornographic", which the list cannot separate from the colour. 色情, the plain word for pornography, is about eight times as common as 黄片.
• A few of the subtitles are in traditional characters. 黑色 and 白色 are spelled the same in both scripts, so their traditional spellings are added for the other colours too (紅色, 藍色 …). 黃色 never appears as a word in the list, so yellow is very slightly undercounted against the rest.
• Most of these subtitles are translated, mainly from English-language films, so the figures show what translators write as much as what Chinese speakers say.

The green hat, in all its spellings, comes to 1.5 per million words, about as often as 红包 (1.4).

The same ranking for European languages is in colours in German, colours in Italian and colours in Portuguese; black, white and red are near the top in all of them.

Learn them in a sentence

• 这是什么颜色？ Zhè shì shénme yánsè? — What colour is this?
• 是红色的。 Shì hóngsè de. — It's red.
• 你最喜欢什么颜色？ Nǐ zuì xǐhuan shénme yánsè? — What's your favourite colour?
• 我最喜欢蓝色。 Wǒ zuì xǐhuan lánsè. — Blue is my favourite.
• 她穿着一件白衣服。 Tā chuānzhe yí jiàn bái yīfu. — She's wearing white clothes.
• 我要黑色的。 Wǒ yào hēisè de. — I'd like the black one.

The Mandarin course teaches the colours with the nouns they describe, free on the web, and they are in the most common Mandarin words.

Each colour word is built on a character that turns up in many other words; how often each character appears is in the most common Chinese characters.

Red at its busiest, at the Lunar New Year, and the wishes that go with the red packets in 2027, are on Chinese New Year 2027 greetings in Mandarin.

Sources

• Wei Bi, “Five Basic Colour Terms and Colour Taboos in Ancient China (Part One)”, Roczniki Humanistyczne 72, no. 9 (2024): 101–120, doi:10.18290/rh24729.6: red with wealth, dignity and happiness (in the abstracts of both parts), weddings, births and the New Year; red forbidden at funerals and avoided in letters; yellow as the imperial colour, reserved robes, the Qing ranks of yellow, yellow roofs, 黄袍加身 and the mutiny of 960; 黄色 as pornography, from yellow journalism (citing Huang and Chen, 2010), and saohuang in 1948; the five colours with their elements and directions; 赤 as the classical red.
• Wei Bi, “Five Basic Colour Terms and Colour Taboos in Ancient China (Part Two)”, Roczniki Humanistyczne 73, no. 9 (2025): 87–106, doi:10.18290/rh25739.6: white for mourning, the Classic of Poetry, 白事, white at funerals today; black under the Qin, black for water, north and winter, black avoided on festive days, 黑社会, 黑车, 黑心; 青 as green, blue and black, with 绿 and 蓝 derived from it; the seasons of the four directions; the Yuan statutes on 青 headscarves, the Ming green headbands, and the green hat (quoting 王书奴, 中国娼妓史, 1935).
• Victoria Bogushevskaya, “Chinese GRUE: on the original meaning and evolution of qing 青” (2015), hdl.handle.net/11587/498910: 青 as a green-blue-black category, and not a basic colour term in contemporary Chinese.
• Jun Wang and Chenghui Guan, “The tenacity of culture as represented by the Chinese color term Qing”, Language and Semiotic Studies 8, no. 4 (2022): 145–164, doi:10.1515/lass-2022-0002.
• Kin Wai Michael Siu, “Chinese Red Packets: Reflecting Changes of Cultures and Relations”, Popular Culture Review 11, no. 2 (2000): 5–15, doi:10.1002/j.2831-865x.2000.tb00513.x: the Ming origin of red packets, the occasions they are given on, and who gives them to whom.
• Yuling Li, New meaning in traditional wedding dresses – Xiu He Fu and Long Feng Gua – in contemporary China, University of Malaya (2019), studentsrepo.um.edu.my: the Western white wedding dress in China, and the return of traditional dresses.
• Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press; 2002 edition, ISBN 0-8047-4559-5), p. 218, as cited by Wikipedia, Cuckold: the green head-scarf laws from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.
• Feng Jiang, Su Lu, Xiang Yao, Xiaodong Yue and Wing Tung Au, “Up or Down? How Culture and Color Affect Judgments”, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 27, no. 3 (2014): 226–234, doi:10.1002/bdm.1800: red for up and green for down on the mainland, the opposite in Hong Kong, and the experiments.
• AllSet Learning, Chinese Grammar Wiki: Adjective (a one-character adjective modifies a noun directly; 很 rather than 是), Modifying nouns with adjective + “de” (two-character adjectives generally need 的; “the red one”), Structural particle “de” (红色的自行车) and Distinguishing word (colours, with 是 and 的).
• CC-CEDICT, cc-cedict.org (also served by MDBG): every colour word and its pinyin; 色 as “look” and “sex”, 色情, 颜色; 青 and 青菜, 青天, 青丝, 青花, 青年; 蓝 as “indigo plant”; 红 as “popular”, 走红, 红色 “revolutionary”, 白色 “reactionary”, 红军; 红包 and 压岁钱; 白事, 红白喜事; 黄色, 黄片, 扫黄, 黄金, 黄金周; 戴绿帽子, 绿帽子 and the slang verb 绿; 黑, 黑社会, 黑车, 黑心; 金; 深色, 浅色, 天蓝色; 五行 and 五色; the idioms in the table; 红盘 and 绿盘.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list for simplified Chinese (zh_cn), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_zhcolours.py and printed from its output rather than typed.