Latin/Colors

Salvēte omnēs! We're providing easy Latin lessons here on Wikiversity. If you would like to review, you can find past lessons in the directory, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses on the right.

We'll work on learning the Latin names for colors this week; soon we will add vocabulary for clothing and we'll be well prepared to describe it! Color names are adjectives; to review the two basic types of Latin adjectives see Adjectives lesson 1 and Adjectives lesson 2. The other thing you should be aware of is that there is a wide range of variation in color terminology usage in Latin; a good explanation of this is available here. You can also take a look at this post for a huge variety of Latin color names, but it is information overload compared to the basic colors we'll be sharing today.

Practice
Latin color names have many derivatives in English; candidates for public office used to have to be very honest and pure, even to the shiny clean togas they wore, which were symbolic of their candor. For instance, words like obfuscate, rubric, albatross; some common Roman names were color-based, such as Rūfus and Flāvius. And of course, Harry Potter has such names as Rubeus Hagrid and Albus Dumbledore.

We have our first lesson in clothing next time. Valēte!