Colors in Spanish: los colores, ranked by use

The colors in Spanish are rojo (red), azul (blue), verde (green), amarillo (yellow), naranja (orange), rosa (pink), morado (purple), marrón or café (brown), negro (black), blanco (white) and gris (grey). "Colours" is los colores, and every colour is masculine when you use it as a noun: el rojo, el verde. Brown is the one word that changes with the country, and purple is the one Spanish cannot settle on. Below are the words with how to say them, the agreement rules as the Real Academia Española sets them out, which word for brown to use where, and a ranking of the colours Spanish film and television dialogue actually says.

Updated 4 November 2026 · 6 min read

The colours in Spanish

In most of Spain the z of azul and the c of celeste are said like English "th": ah-THOOL, theh-LES-teh. Spanish v sounds like b, so verde begins with a b sound.

When a colour changes its ending

A colour used as an adjective comes after the noun and agrees with it. The Real Academia's Diccionario panhispánico de dudas sets out the rules in its entry on colours, and they come down to four.

• Colours ending in -o have four forms. Una falda roja (a red skirt), unos pantalones negros (black trousers), unas carpetas amarillas (yellow folders).
• Colours ending in -e or a consonant have two, singular and plural, whatever the gender: un coche verde, dos casas verdes; el cielo azul, los ojos azules; un gato gris, dos gatos grises.
• Colours named after a thing can stay as they are. Rosa is a rose and naranja an orange, and the Academia accepts both faldas naranja and faldas naranjas, camisas rosa and camisas rosas. Learners can safely leave them unchanged.
• A colour with claro or oscuro stays masculine singular. Una camisa azul claro (a light blue shirt), hojas verde oscuro (dark green leaves). The Academia calls this the majority usage and recommends it, though the agreeing azul clara does turn up.

As a noun, every colour is masculine, and the plural follows the ordinary rules: el blanco, los azules, los rosas. ¿De qué color es? asks "what colour is it?".

Marrón or café: brown depends on the country

Spanish has no single word for brown. Which one you hear depends on where you are, and the Spanish Wikipedia article on the colour, citing a 2010 study of colour words in Santiago de Chile, sets it out like this:

• Marrón, borrowed from French marron (chestnut), is the everyday word in Spain, Cuba, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay.
• Café, the colour of coffee, is used in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile.
• Castaño, from castaña (chestnut), is the word for brown hair and eyes in Spain, Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, even where marrón covers everything else: tiene el pelo castaño, "she has brown hair".

So a pair of brown shoes is marrón in Madrid and café in Mexico City. Both words are understood everywhere; each is simply not what the other side would say.

Which colours do Spanish films say most?

We added up every form of each colour word in Spanish film and television subtitles.

Negro comes first, at 211.4 times per million words, with blanco almost level at 203.6 and rojo a clear third at 128.5. Negro and blanco are the only two colours common enough to be among the thousand words Spanish films say most. Morado is second from last, at 9.6, and celeste last, at 4.5.

Three things the table leaves out on purpose:

• Café, which a word count cannot separate from the coffee. It is said 151.0 times per million words, more than any colour but black and white, and there is no telling how much of that is the colour. That is why brown in the table is marrón and castaño only.
• Rosas, the plural, which is mostly roses. Only rosa and rosado are counted for pink.
• The other purples. Spanish splits purple between four words: morado (9.6), lila (5.6), púrpura (5.3) and violeta (3.1). Added together they come to 23.5, which would lift purple to eighth place, still behind yellow. Morado is the everyday word; lila (lilac) and violeta (violet) are named after flowers, and púrpura is the formal word, from the purple dye of the ancient world.

The word for colour itself, color with its plural colores, is said 91.4 times per million words, more often than any colour except black, white and red.

The same order in every language

Black, white and red are the three most-mentioned colours in Spanish, as they are in Italian, German and French. Purple and orange sit at or near the bottom in all of them. That matches a pattern Brent Berlin and Paul Kay described in 1969: languages with only a few basic colour words almost always have black and white first, then red, while purple, pink, orange and grey come last.

Use them in a sentence

• ¿De qué color es? — What colour is it?
• Es rojo. — It's red.
• ¿Cuál es tu color favorito? — What's your favourite colour?
• Me gusta el azul. — I like blue.
• Tiene los ojos verdes. — He has green eyes. (Or she.)
• Quiero una camiseta negra. — I want a black T-shirt.
• La casa es azul claro. — The house is light blue.

Negro and blanco are in the top thousand of the frequency list behind the most common Spanish words; the other colours are in the course's Spanish word list. The free Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches each colour with the nouns it describes. Other beginner sets: greetings in Spanish, numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish, family members in Spanish, the days of the week and the months of the year.

The same count in other languages: colours in Portuguese, colours in Italian, colours in French, colours in German and colors in Chinese.

Sources

• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2nd edition: colores, for gender, plurals and every agreement rule above.
• Wikipedia (Spanish): Marrón, for the countries that say marrón, café and castaño, citing Valencia, A. (2010), "Léxico del color en Santiago de Chile", RLA. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada 48(2), doi.org.
• Wiktionary: café, marrón, celeste and morado, for the meanings.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py and printed from its output rather than typed.
• Wikipedia: Basic Color Terms, on Berlin and Kay's 1969 study of the order in which languages name colours.