Is yellower a word

• #1

Are these words (YELLOWER AND YELLOWEST) used properly?….
thanks for your help..

EXAMPLES :
— My pencil is yellower than yours.
— My duck is the yellowest of the farm.

• #2

I would say «on the farm,» but yes, your examples are correct.

• #3

I would say «on the farm,» but yes, your examples are correct.

What about that rule about adding ‘er/est’ only to monosyllables? A disyllabic word like ‘yellow’, would be: more yellow/ the most yellow of …

• #4

What about that rule about adding ‘er/est’ only to monosyllables? A disyllabic word like ‘yellow’, would be: more yellow/ the most yellow of …

I have never heard this rule before. Words like «funnier» or «stupider» or «dirtier» are standard. Notwithstanding, «more yellow» and «most yellow» sound more natural to me than «yellower» and «yellowest.» The dictionary lists «yellower» as a word, but not «oranger.» There is no real rule in place that determines what is a word and what isn’t.

• #5

They sound perfectly find to me (after going over them in my head). That’s the general rule, but English, however, is subject to many «exceptions».

• #6

I have never heard this rule before. Words like «funnier» or «stupider» or «dirtier» are standard. Notwithstanding, «more yellow» and «most yellow» sound more natural to me than «yellower» and «yellowest.» The dictionary lists «yellower» as a word, but not «oranger.» There is no real rule in place that determines what is a word and what isn’t.

Try with more than two syllables: ‘intelligent’
* She’s intelligenter than…

(The multisyllable rule is what they teach you when you’re learning English. Of course, tons of exceptions, particularly in the disyllabic words. It’s called ‘weight’. Some syllables are heavier than others).

• #7

But »intelligent» is four syllables, «yellow» is only two.
And I would say »the yellowest one on the farm,» but that’s by the bye.

• #8

What about that rule about adding ‘er/est’ only to monosyllables? A disyllabic word like ‘yellow’, would be: more yellow/ the most yellow of …

I have never heard of a hard and fast rule like this, but certainly the longer the original adjective, the less likely it is to work with the addition of the suffix «-er/-est».

I have never heard this rule before. Words like «funnier» or «stupider» or «dirtier» are standard.

«Stupider» is not standard English.

Notwithstanding, «more yellow» and «most yellow» sound more natural to me than «yellower» and «yellowest.»

I certainly agree with this, although even at that Yellow is not an adjective that lends itself well to comparitives.

If two pencils are yellow, but different yellows, how can one be «more yellow» than the other. Surely something is either yellow or it is not.

The dictionary lists «yellower» as a word, but not «oranger.» There is no real rule in place that determines what is a word and what isn’t.

Dictionaries have some wierd stuff sometimes… don’t believe everything you read…

• #9

«Stupider» is not standard English.

If «stupider» isn’t standard English, what about «stupidest»? (Answer: They are both standard.)

• #10

If «stupider» isn’t standard English, what about «stupidest»? (Answer: They are both standard.)

Neither are considered standard english on this side of the pond.
More stupid / most stupid
The words «stupider»/»stupidest» although current in usage, appear (at least to British/Irish english speakers) to be a purposeful reflection by the speaker of the sense of what they are saying… i.e. a «stupider» person would say «stupider» if you get my drift. (Not casting aspertions here, I just mean that it sounds like the word is used for effect more than for the want of using correct english).

• #11

I’m curioser and curioser (Alice in Wonderland)

• #12

Saying that was the stupidest thing I ever heard would be both rude and an exaggeration This is the first time I’ve heard the use of «stupidest» questioned, though, and «most stupid» sounds extremely awkward to me. But hey, if you say so …
As for «curiouser and curiouser,» Alice was referring to the increasing strangeness of her situation, not to her own level of curiosity. FYI …

• #13

Saying that was the stupidest thing I ever heard would be both rude and an exaggeration This is the first time I’ve heard the use of «stupidest» questioned, though, and «most stupid» sounds extremely awkward to me. But hey, if you say so …
As for «curiouser and curiouser,» Alice was referring to the increasing strangeness of her situation, not to her own level of curiosity. FYI …

Yes, it’s ‘curious’ with the meaning of ‘strange’.
And I even misspelled it !!! (misspelt?)
Sorry.

obz

Senior Member

• #14

Words ending in «ow» break the general syllable rule of superlatives and comparatives.

Yellower, yellowest, hollower, hollowest, etc are perfectly fine.

Two-syllable adjectives ending in –er, -le, or –ow take –er and –est to form the comparative and superlative forms.
Two-Syllable Adjective Ending with -er, -le, or -ow Comparative Form Superlative Form narrow narrower narrowest gentle gentler gentlest

• The roads in this town are narrower than the roads in the city.
• This road is the narrowest of all the roads in California.
• Big dogs are gentler than small dogs.
• Of all the dogs in the world, English Mastiffs are the gentlest.

• #15

So according to that, «stupider» and «stupidest» are incorrect? Sorry, that just doesn’t sound right to me.
Edit: Yes, it’s «misspelled» in the US. Those «t» endings generally are British, but I couldn’t tell you which ones are in use. Ask elirlandes …
(And maybe you meant you were getting stranger and stranger! You seem fine to me, though )

Last edited: Jul 25, 2010

obz

Senior Member

• #16

No… this makes no mention of «id» words. It’s not to say other bi-syllabic superlatives are wrong, just how these are formed.

Stupider and stupidest are completely fine… to exclude them would be stupider than the stupidest thing I have ever heard
(though I think it’s jsut a lone exception, as «lucid, flaccid, placid, etc» and other «id» words sure sound bad in «er» and «est» forms)

Edit k-in-sc… thought you were talking to me

Last edited: Jul 25, 2010

• #17

Oh, I thought it was saying only two-syllable adjectives with those endings took »-er» and »-est» and the rest had to take «more» and «most.»
And no, «stranger and stranger» was for Alice la uruguaya. But you might want to get your nose checked out

• #19

Well, if one duckling is sort of brown and the other is more of a yellow color, it’s yellower.
But I agree that it’s not a very good example.

obz

Senior Member

• #20

I still think that one duck cannot be yellow than another…
Perhaps it has more yellow, is a more intense yellow, is a darker/lighter yellow, but yellower?
For example, which of these ducks is «yellower» and why?
http://www.pennfield.net/students/images/yellow-duck_gif.jpg
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20071228-yellow-duck.jpg
I would say that one is a duller yellow than the other, but neither is more yellow than the other… no?

Really? That just has to boil down to linguistic choice and color perception (aka semantics). I could certainly say one thing is yellower than another, if comparing the amount of yellow… you seem to be comparing the qualities and attributes of the yellows…. which is not what relative superlatives are for.

Ok, given 2 roads of varying width… is one road narrower than another?

• #21

No… this makes no mention of «id» words. It’s not to say other bi-syllabic superlatives are wrong, just how these are formed.
(though I think it’s jsut a lone exception, as «lucid, flaccid, placid, etc» and other «id» words sure sound bad in «er» and «est» forms)

Edit k-in-sc… thought you were talking to me

Uh, and even monosyllables ending in -ic ?
Like ‘chic’
Chicer, chicest, chicker, chiquer? In the newspaper (Chicago Tribune) they have no problem with ‘the chicest sale of the year’.
(plastic-est, etc.)

• #22

That’s sometimes written «chic-est,» to keep the second «c» hard.

obz

Senior Member

• #23

Uh, and even monosyllables ending in -ic ?
Like ‘chic’
Chicer, chicest, chicker, chiquer? In the newspaper (Chicago Tribune) they have no problem with ‘the chicest sale of the year’.
(plastic-est, etc.)

«chic» is a foreign word somewhat recently incorporated into English… do with it what you will.

It’s the language of exceptions, those were just some rules for creating superlatives and comparatives. Not a comprehensive or definitive list.

• #24

«chic» is a foreign word somewhat recently incorporated into English… do with it what you will.

It’s the language of exceptions, those were just some rules for creating superlatives and comparatives. Not a comprehensive or definitive list.

You’re right. We are dealing with generalizations here. The problem are always the exceptions, that make the rules longer. And there are very many exceptions, so we need rules for them too.

For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

Definitions For Yellower

Adjective

{{en-comparative of, yellow}}

Words With Friends
YES

Scrabble US
YES

Scrabble UK
YES

English International (SOWPODS)
YES

Scrabble Global
YES

Enable1 Dictionary
YES

Points in Different Games

Scrabble

14

Words with Friends

15

The word Yellower is worth 14 points in Scrabble and 15 points in Words with Friends

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English[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

• yeallow (obsolete), yeller (dialect)

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English yelwe, yelou, from Old English ġeolwe, oblique form of Old English ġeolu, from Proto-West Germanic *gelu, from Proto-Germanic *gelwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃wos, from *ǵʰelh₃- (“gleam, yellow”).

Compare Welsh gwelw (“pale”), Latin helvus (“dull yellow”), Irish geal (“white, bright”), Italian giallo (“yellow”) Lithuanian žalias (“green”), Ancient Greek χλωρός (khlōrós, “light green”), Persian زرد‎ (zard, “yellow”), Sanskrit हरि (hari, “greenish-yellow”). Cognate with German gelb (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”).

The verb is from Old English ġeolwian, from the adjective.

Pronunciation[edit]

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈjɛl.əʊ/
• (General American) enPR: yĕl′ō, IPA^(key): /ˈjɛl.oʊ/
• (dialect) IPA^(key): /ˈjɛl.ɚ/
• (dated, Southern US folk speech) IPA^(key): /jɛlə/, /ˈjælə/, /ˈjɑlə/, /ˈjɪlə/, /ˈjʌlə/^[1]
• Rhymes: -ɛləʊ

Adjective[edit]

yellow (comparative yellower or more yellow, superlative yellowest or most yellow)

1. Having yellow as its color.

   • 1667, John Milton, “Book X”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, line 434:

     A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought / First fruits, the green ear and the yellow sheaf.

   • 1827, [John Keble], “Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity”, in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume II, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J. Parker; and C[harles] and J[ohn] Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 85:

     Red o’er the forest glows the setting sun, / The line of yellow light dies fast away / That crown’d the eastern copse, and chill and dun / Falls on the moor the brief November day.

   • 1911, J. Milton Hayes, «The green eye of the little yellow god,»

     There’s a one-eyed yellow idol / To the north of Kathmandu; / There’s a little marble cross below the town; / And a brokenhearted woman / Tends the grave of ‘Mad’ Carew, / While the yellow god for ever gazes down.

   • 1962 (quoting c. 1398 text), Hans Kurath & Sherman M. Kuhn, editors, Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, ISBN 978-0-472-01044-8, page 1242:

     dorrẹ̅, dōrī adj. & n. […] Golden or reddish-yellow […] (a. 1398) *Trev. Barth. 59b/a: ȝelouȝ colour [of urine] […] tokeneþ febleness of hete […] dorrey & citrine & liȝt red tokeneþ mene.

   Antonyms: nonyellow, unyellow

2. (informal) Lacking courage.

   • 1951, J. D. Salinger, chapter 13, in The Catcher in the Rye, Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC:

     What you should be is not yellow at all. If you’re supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it.

   • 1975, Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

     You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to you!

   Synonym: cowardly

3. (publishing, journalism) Characterized by sensationalism, lurid content, and doubtful accuracy.
   • 2004, Doreen Carvajal, «Photo edict muffles gossipy press,» International Herald Tribune, 4 Oct. (retrieved 29 July 2008),

     The denizens of the gossipy world of the pink press, purple prose and yellow tabloids are shivering over disputed photographs of Princess Caroline of Monaco.

4. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Of the skin, having the colour traditionally attributed to Far East Asians, especially Chinese.

   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     They were all tall and all handsome, though they varied in their degree of darkness of skin, some being as dark as Mahomed, and some as yellow as a Chinese.

5. (chiefly derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur) Far East Asian (relating to Asian people).
   • 1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu

     Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

   • 1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 516:

     The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp.

6. (dated, Australia, offensive) Of mixed Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry.
   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, Chapter VI, p. 64, [1]

     «Eh, Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?».

   • 1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins 2001, p. 74:

     A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me. “Give us a drink, yeller feller.”

7. (dated, US) Synonym of high yellow
   • 1933 September 9, James Thurber, “My Life and Hard Times—VI. A Sequence of Servants”, in The New Yorker

     Charley threw her over for a yellow gal named Nancy: he never forgave Vashti for the vanishing from his life of a menace that had come to mean more to him than Vashti herself.

8. (UK politics) Related to the Liberal Democrats.
   • 2012 March 2, Andrew Grice, «Yellow rebels take on Clegg over NHS ‘betrayal'», The Independent

   yellow constituencies

9. (politics) Related to the Free Democratic Party; a political party in Germany.

   the black-yellow coalition

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Noun[edit]

yellow (plural yellows)

1. The colour of gold, cheese, or a lemon; the colour obtained by mixing green and red light, or by subtracting blue from white light.

   • 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper:

     It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

2. (US) The intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights, the illumination of which indicates that drivers should stop short of the intersection if it is safe to do so.
3. (snooker) One of the colour balls used in snooker, with a value of 2 points.
4. (pocket billiards) One of two groups of object balls, or a ball from that group, as used in the principally British version of pool that makes use of unnumbered balls (the (yellow(s) and red(s)); contrast stripes and solids in the originally American version with numbered balls).
5. (sports) A yellow card.

   • 2011 April 15, Saj Chowdhury, “Norwich 2 — 1 Nott’m Forest”, in BBC Sport‎^[2]:

     Andrew Surman fired in what proved to be a 37th-minute winner before Forest’s Paul Konchesky saw red late on. That second yellow for the loan signing came in stoppage time and did not affect the outcome of a game which Norwich dominated.

6. Any of various pierid butterflies of the subfamily Coliadinae, especially the yellow coloured species. Compare sulphur.

Synonyms[edit]

• (light wavelengths): xantho- (xanth-)
• (intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights): amber (British)

Antonyms[edit]

• (intermediate light in a set of three traffic lights): red, green

Hyponyms[edit]

• (color): bronze yellow, cadmium yellow, fast yellow AB, quinoline yellow, school bus yellow, sulfur yellow, sulphur yellow, taxi yellow, yellow-green, yellow 2G

Derived terms[edit]

• beyellowed
• see yellow

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

yellow (third-person singular simple present yellows, present participle yellowing, simple past and past participle yellowed)

1. (intransitive) To become yellow or more yellow.
   • 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York Review Books 2006, page 47:

     Then suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows in from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath.

   • 2013, Robert Miraldi, Seymour Hersh, Potomac Books, Inc., →ISBN, page 187:

     Interviews, clippings, yellowing stories from foreign newspapers, notebooks with old scribblings. Salisbury called it the debris of a reporter always too much on the run to sort out the paper, but there it was, an investigator’s dream, […]

2. (transitive) To make (something) yellow or more yellow.

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

• All pages with yellow as a prefix

Colors in English · colors, colours(layout · text)

white	gray, grey	black
red; crimson	orange; brown	yellow; cream
lime, lime green	green	mint
cyan; teal	azure, sky blue	blue
violet; indigo	magenta; purple	pink

References[edit]

• yellow at OneLook Dictionary Search

Anagrams[edit]

• Yowell

Etymology Of The Word Yellow

Etymologists, experts who study word origins, used detective work worthy of Sherlock Holmes to determine the original Proto-Indo-European word was ghelwo. From the ancient origin of the word yellow, the word entered Proto-Germanic, another extinct language for which there are no written records.

Etymologists speculate the word for yellow was gelwaz. Proto-Germanic gave birth to even more languages, such as Old English, Middle Dutch and Old High German. It was through Old English, the tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, that experts find evidence the word for yellow had become geolu or geolwe.

Ancient Origin Of The Word Yellow

In fact, the oldest written use of the Anglo-Saxon word is found in the epic poem Beowulf, which was penned in Old English sometime between the 8th and 11th century. The unknown author used it to describe a shield carved from yew wood.

So the next time you say the word yellow, consider that you’re using to a word with origins that go back at least a thousand years—and likely much further than that.

More What’s Behind the Color Name

Feature Image Credit: Vadim Misyuchenko on Unsplash