Colours in German: die Farben, ranked by use
The colours in German are rot (red), blau (blue), grün (green), gelb (yellow), orange (orange), rosa (pink), lila (purple), braun (brown), schwarz (black), weiß (white) and grau (grey). "Colours" is die Farben (or colors, in American spelling). Several look like their English cousins. What needs learning is the ending a colour takes in front of a noun. Below are the words, the rule, and a ranking of the colours German films actually say.
The colours in German
| English | German | Say it |
|---|---|---|
| red | rot | roht |
| blue | blau | blow, to rhyme with "now" |
| green | grün | gruen, with rounded lips |
| yellow | gelb | gelp |
| orange | orange | oh-RAHNZH |
| pink | rosa | ROH-za |
| purple | lila | LEE-la |
| brown | braun | brown |
| black | schwarz | shvarts |
| white | weiß | vice |
| grey | grau | grow, to rhyme with "now" |
Three sounds to watch. W is the English v, so weiß starts like "vice" and schwarz has "shv" at the front. Z is "ts", which is how schwarz ends. And a b at the end of a word is said as p: gelb.
When a colour takes an ending
After "is", a colour never changes. Das Auto ist rot (the car is red), die Autos sind rot, die Tür ist rot: one form, whatever the noun.
In front of a noun, it takes an adjective ending. The ending depends on the noun's gender and case and on the article before it:
- der rote Wagen (the red car), ein roter Wagen (a red car)
- die rote Tür (the red door), eine rote Tür
- das rote Haus (the red house), ein rotes Haus
- die roten Häuser (the red houses)
These are the same endings every German adjective takes, and they are set out in der, die or das.
Rosa and lila take no ending. Ein rosa Kleid (a pink dress), eine lila Blume (a purple flower). Orange is traditionally left unchanged too.
Lighter and darker shades are one word. Put hell (light) or dunkel (dark) in front: hellblau, dunkelgrün, dunkelrot.
As a noun, a colour has a capital and is neuter: das Rot, ein helles Blau. "In red" is in Rot.
Which colours do German films say most?
We added up every form of each colour word in German film and television subtitles.
| Colour | Word | Forms counted | Per million words | The count also includes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| black | schwarz | schwarz, schwarze, schwarzen, schwarzer, schwarzes, schwarzem | 143.3 | |
| red | rot | rot, rote, roten, roter, rotes, rotem | 111.9 | |
| white | weiß | weiße, weißen, weißer, weißes, weißem | 107.0 | endings only: plain weiß is also “knows” |
| blue | blau | blau, blaue, blauen, blauer, blaues, blauem | 75.6 | also “drunk” |
| green | grün | grün, grüne, grünen, grüner, grünes, grünem | 59.5 | |
| pink | rosa | rosa, pink | 26.0 | rosa is also a woman's name |
| yellow | gelb | gelb, gelbe, gelben, gelber, gelbes, gelbem | 25.7 | |
| brown | braun | braun, braune, braunen, brauner, braunes, braunem | 22.6 | also a surname |
| grey | grau | grau, graue, grauen, grauer, graues, grauem | 22.1 | |
| purple | lila | lila, violett | 11.0 | |
| orange | orange | orange | 8.8 | also the fruit |
Schwarz is first, at 143.3 times per million words, then rot at 111.9. Orange is last, at 8.8.
Weiß needs a caution of its own. Plain weiß is also "knows", as in ich weiß, "I know", one of the commonest verb forms in the language: it is said 2291.5 times per million words, more than all the colours put together, and almost none of that is the colour. So the table counts only the forms with an ending, weiße, weißen and so on, which can only be the colour. That gives 107.0, an undercount, and still enough for third place.
Two other notes from the last column: blau is also the everyday word for "drunk", and braun and rosa are also names.
The same order in every language
Black, white and red are the three most-mentioned colours in Italian and in German, and the commonest three in Portuguese are white, red and blue, with black next. Orange and purple are at or near the bottom in all of them. 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 a language names first are also, it seems, the ones its speakers go on mentioning most.
Learn them in a sentence
- Welche Farbe hat das? — What colour is that?
- Es ist rot. — It's red.
- Was ist deine Lieblingsfarbe? — What's your favourite colour?
- Meine Lieblingsfarbe ist Grün. — My favourite colour is green.
- Sie hat blaue Augen. — She has blue eyes.
- Ich möchte ein schwarzes T-Shirt. — I'd like a black T-shirt.
Apart from weiß in its other meaning, no colour is common enough to be among the thousand words German films say most: the top of that list is mostly grammar, as the 100 most common German words shows. They are in the course's German word list. The German course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with the nouns they describe, free on the web. Other beginner sets: numbers 1 to 100 in German, the days of the week and the months of the year. The same ranking for two other languages: colours in Italian and colours in Portuguese.
Two more beginner sets, ranked the same way: greetings in German and family members in German.
Sources
- Wiktionary (German): rosa, lila and orange, for the adjectives that take no ending, and blau for the sense "drunk".
- 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.pyand 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.