Colours in Italian: i colori, ranked by use
The colours in Italian are rosso (red), blu (blue), verde (green), giallo (yellow), arancione (orange), rosa (pink), viola (purple), marrone (brown), nero (black), bianco (white) and grigio (grey), with azzurro for light blue. "Colours" is i colori (or colors, in American spelling). The words are easy; what takes a minute to learn is that some of them change their ending to match the noun and three never do. Below are the words, the rule, and a ranking of the colours Italian films actually say.
The colours in Italian
| English | Italian | Say it | Forms |
|---|---|---|---|
| red | rosso | ROS-so | rosso, rossa, rossi, rosse |
| white | bianco | BYAN-ko | bianco, bianca, bianchi, bianche |
| black | nero | NEH-ro | nero, nera, neri, nere |
| yellow | giallo | JAL-lo | giallo, gialla, gialli, gialle |
| grey | grigio | GREE-jo | grigio, grigia, grigi, grigie |
| light blue | azzurro | ad-DZOOR-ro | azzurro, azzurra, azzurri, azzurre |
| green | verde | VEHR-deh | verde, verdi |
| brown | marrone | mar-ROH-neh | marrone, marroni |
| orange | arancione | ah-ran-CHOH-neh | arancione, arancioni |
| blue | blu | bloo | never changes |
| pink | rosa | ROH-za | never changes |
| purple | viola | vee-OH-la | never changes |
Which colours change their ending
A colour is an adjective, it comes after the noun, and it agrees with the noun in three different ways.
- Colours ending in -o have four forms. Il vestito rosso (the red dress), la macchina rossa (the red car), i vestiti rossi, le macchine rosse. Bianco keeps its hard sound in the plural by adding an h: bianchi, bianche.
- Colours ending in -e have two forms, one for singular and one for plural, whatever the gender: il prato verde, la porta verde, i prati verdi, le porte verdi.
- Blu, rosa and viola never change. Una gonna blu, due gonne blu; i fiori rosa; le scarpe viola. Rosa and viola are really the names of flowers, the rose and the violet, used as colours.
For lighter and darker shades add chiaro (light) or scuro (dark) after the colour, and the pair then stays unchanged: occhi verde chiaro, "light green eyes"; una giacca blu scuro, "a dark blue jacket".
Blu and azzurro
Italian has two everyday words where English has one. Blu is a darker blue and azzurro a lighter one, the blue of a clear sky. Italians treat them as different colours, in the way English treats red and pink. Azzurro is also the colour of Italy's national sports teams, whose players are called gli Azzurri.
Which colours do Italian films say most?
We added up every form of each colour word in Italian film and television subtitles.
| Colour | Word | Forms counted | Per million words | The count also includes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| white | bianco | bianco, bianca, bianchi, bianche | 171.1 | |
| black | nero | nero, nera, neri, nere | 169.8 | |
| red | rosso | rosso, rossa, rossi, rosse | 135.0 | also the surname Rossi |
| green | verde | verde, verdi | 64.0 | also the surname Verdi |
| blue | blu | blu | 58.1 | |
| pink | rosa | rosa | 41.0 | also the flower, and a woman's name |
| yellow | giallo | giallo, gialla, gialli, gialle | 31.0 | also a crime novel or film |
| grey | grigio | grigio, grigia, grigi, grigie | 19.0 | |
| light blue | azzurro | azzurro, azzurra, azzurri, azzurre | 13.1 | |
| purple | viola | viola | 12.4 | also the instrument, the flower and a name |
| brown | marrone | marrone, marroni | 12.1 | |
| orange | arancione | arancione, arancioni | 7.8 |
Bianco and nero are almost level at the top, at 171.1 and 169.8 times per million words, with rosso third at 135.0. Those three are each said more than twice as often as any other colour. Arancione is last, at 7.8.
The last column matters for a few of them. Rosa is also the flower and a woman's name, and viola is also the instrument and the flower, so those two counts are ceilings. Blu is said 58.1 times per million words and azzurro 13.1: in dialogue, the darker word is the commoner one by a wide margin.
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
- Di che colore è? — What colour is it?
- È rosso. — It's red.
- Qual è il tuo colore preferito? — What's your favourite colour?
- Mi piace il verde. — I like green.
- Ha gli occhi azzurri. — He has blue eyes. (Or she.)
- Vorrei una maglietta nera. — I'd like a black T-shirt.
Only one colour, nero, is common enough to be among the thousand words Italian films say most; the top of that list is mostly grammar, as the 100 most common Italian words shows. The rest are in the course's Italian word list. The Italian course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with the nouns they describe, free on the web. Other beginner sets: numbers 1 to 100 in Italian, the days of the week and the months of the year. The same ranking for two other languages: colours in German and colours in Portuguese.
Two more beginner sets, ranked the same way: greetings in Italian and family members in Italian.
Sources
- Treccani, Vocabolario on line: blu, azzurro, rosa and viola, for the meanings and the invariable forms.
- 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.