Colours in French: masculine and feminine

The colours in French are rouge (red), bleu (blue), vert (green), jaune (yellow), orange (orange), rose (pink), violet (purple), marron or brun (brown), noir (black), blanc (white) and gris (grey). "Colours" is les couleurs (or colors, in American spelling). A French colour is an adjective, so most of them have a masculine and a feminine form and add -s in the plural: un pull vert, une robe verte. Two everyday colours, orange and marron, never change at all, and a colour of two words, such as bleu clair, never changes either. The French colors list below gives every form, then the rules, then the colours French films actually say.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 8 min read

The colours in French

The last column is how often each colour, all its forms added together, is said in French film and television subtitles. More on that below.

Two sounds to watch. The final consonant of vert, gris and violet is silent and is heard again in the feminine: vert is "vehr" and verte "vehrt", gris "gree" and grise "greez". And blanc, marron and brun end in a nasal vowel, said through the nose with no n or ng sound after it; orange has a nasal vowel too, just before its final zh.

Masculine and feminine: how a French colour agrees

A colour agrees in gender and number with the noun it describes, like most French adjectives, and in everyday French it comes after the noun: une grenouille verte, a green frog. There are four patterns.

1. Add -e for the feminine and -s for the plural. Most colours work this way.

• un pull vert, une robe verte, des pulls verts, des robes vertes
• un ciel bleu, une mer bleue, des yeux bleus, des serviettes bleues
• un chat noir, une voiture noire, des chats noirs, des voitures noires

Gris already ends in -s, so the masculine plural is the same as the singular: un chat gris, des chats gris, but une souris grise, des souris grises.

2. A few have an irregular feminine.

• blanc becomes blanche: un mur blanc, une nuit blanche
• violet becomes violette: un pull violet, une fleur violette
• roux (red, of hair) becomes rousse: des cheveux roux, une fille rousse

3. Colours already ending in -e only change in the plural. Rouge, jaune, rose, beige and mauve are the same in both genders and add -s for more than one: un stylo rouge, une pomme rouge, des pommes rouges; des fleurs jaunes.

4. Colours that never change. These are the ones learners get wrong, and there are three groups.

• A noun used as a colour stays invariable. Orange is the fruit and marron the chestnut, so des chaussures marron means shoes "the colour of a chestnut", and the noun does not agree. The same goes for cerise (cherry), turquoise, noisette (hazelnut), crème, chocolat, citron and dozens more: des yeux noisette, des fleurs turquoise.
• A colour borrowed from another language stays invariable. Des cheveux auburn, une chaise kaki.
• A colour of two or more words stays invariable, every word of it. See the next section.

The exceptions that do agree. A handful of colour words that began as nouns are now treated as full adjectives and agree like vert: rose, mauve, pourpre, écarlate, fauve, incarnat and vermeil. So it is des maillots roses and des lèvres roses, with an s, even though rose is also the flower. The Office québécois de la langue française gives this list of seven, and Larousse gives the same rule for rose.

Orangé (orangey) is a true adjective, not the noun, so it agrees: une casquette orangée.

One trap in the other direction: marron has a second, unrelated meaning, "unlicensed" or "working outside the law", and in that sense it does agree: des avocats marrons, crooked lawyers. Larousse sets the two side by side: des chaussures marron, but des infirmières marronnes.

Light, dark and two-colour words: bleu clair, bleu-vert

Any colour of more than one word is invariable, all of it, whatever the noun. Whether it takes a hyphen depends on what the second word is.

So des yeux bleus (blue eyes) but des yeux bleu clair (light blue eyes), with no s on either word. The usual explanation is that a word has been left out: des draps bleu pâle is des draps d’un bleu pâle, "sheets of a pale blue". The same holds for rose: des écharpes rose clair, des foulards rose bonbon.

When several colours describe one object of several colours, most grammars leave them unchanged and some accept agreement: des vaches noir et blanc (or noires et blanches), black-and-white cows. When each object is a single colour, they agree: des balles bleues, jaunes et rouges, some blue balls, some yellow, some red.

Talking about colours

• De quelle couleur est ta voiture ? — What colour is your car?
• Elle est rouge. — It's red. (Voiture is feminine, so the pronoun is elle.)
• Quelle est ta couleur préférée ? — What's your favourite colour?
• J’aime le vert. — I like green.
• Il s’habille en noir. — He dresses in black.
• Elle a les yeux bleus. — She has blue eyes.
• Je voudrais un tee-shirt blanc. — I'd like a white T-shirt.

Used as a noun, the name of a colour is masculine, even la rose the flower turns into le rose the colour: le rouge, le bleu, un beau violet.

Colour expressions

Several colours have meanings a dictionary lists alongside the colour itself.

• Voir la vie en rose — to see life through rose-tinted glasses.
• Rire jaune — to laugh in a forced way, badly hiding your annoyance.
• Être vert de peur — to go pale with fear (vert can mean livid).
• Passer une nuit blanche — to stay up all night, a night with no sleep.
• Être fleur bleue — to be sentimental, romantic.
• Avoir carte blanche — to have a free hand, full powers.
• Être gris — to be tipsy; être noir, in popular speech, is "drunk".
• Un bleu — a bruise, and also a newcomer, a rookie.
• Il fait noir — it's dark.

Which colours do French films say most?

We added up every form of each colour word in French film and television subtitles, the same count as in the table at the top: noir, noire, noirs and noires together, and so on.

Noir comes first, at 189.0 times per million words, then blanc at 165.4 and rouge at 115.3. Violet is last, at 15.8, just behind orange.

A count of single words cannot tell one meaning from another, so several of these are ceilings rather than exact figures:

• Noir is also "dark", as in il fait noir, and blanc is also white wine and a blank, and Blanche is a name, so the top two are both inflated a little.
• Rose is fifth, at 71.5, ahead of green. Much of that is surely the flower and the name Rose: the count cannot separate them.
• Rouge is also red wine and lipstick (rouge à lèvres), bleu a bruise, jaune an egg yolk, and gris "tipsy".
• Only the singular orange is counted. Because the colour never takes an s, the plural oranges can only be the fruit, said 3.5 times per million words. In the same way marrons is left out (2.3): it is the chestnut, the "unlicensed" sense, or the common mistake of making the colour plural.
• Brown is marron and brun added together. Plain marron is said 7.4 times per million words; brun and its forms together about twice as often, but brune is also a brunette and a dark beer, and brun is the word for dark hair, so that comparison says little about which word French speakers use for a brown coat.

The word couleur itself, with its plural couleurs, is said more often than any colour except black, white, red, blue and pink.

The same order in other languages

Black, white and red are the three most-mentioned colours in French, as they are in Italian and German, and purple and orange are the last two, as they are at or near the bottom in Italian, German and Portuguese. That is close to a pattern linguists noticed long before anyone counted subtitles: in 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that languages which have only a few basic colour words nearly always have black and white first, then red, and that purple, pink, orange and grey come last.

The colours are in the course's French word list, and the 100 most common French words shows what French films say far more often than any colour. The French course teaches the colours with the nouns they describe, so the agreement comes with them. Other beginner sets: numbers 1 to 100 in French and the days of the week in French. The same count for four other languages: colours in Italian, colours in German, colours in Portuguese and colors in Chinese.

The words of the French Christmas season, from the sapin to the bûche, are in Merry Christmas in French.

The words for mother, father, the in-laws and the rest of the family are in family members in French.

Sources

• Office québécois de la langue française, Banque de dépannage linguistique: Accord des adjectifs de couleur de forme simple (agreement, nouns used as colours, borrowed colours, the seven exceptions), Accord des adjectifs de couleur de forme composée (compound colours and the hyphen), Accord des adjectifs de couleur coordonnés ou juxtaposés and Listes d’adjectifs de couleur (every form of the variable colours, and the invariable ones).
• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: rose (agreement, rose clair, voir la vie en rose), orange and marron (invariable; marron “unlicensed”, which agrees), jaune (rire jaune, egg yolk), vert (vert de peur), blanc (nuit blanche, white wine), bleu (bruise, newcomer), gris and noir (tipsy, drunk, il fait noir), brun (hair, dark beer), rouge (red wine, lipstick), violet, fleur (fleur bleue) and carte (carte blanche).
• 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.