Colors in Japanese

The color words at a glance

Most everyday colors are a single kanji or a kanji plus 色 (いろ, color). The table lists the form you use before a noun, which is the part that trips learners up and is explained in the next section.

Several of these are built from a plain noun plus 色: 茶色 is literally tea color, 灰色 is ash color, 桃色 is peach color and 水色 is water color. Japanese also has a darker gray, 鼠色 (ねずみいろ, mouse color), and English loanwords in katakana are common for the newer colors: ピンク, グレー, オレンジ and グリーン all appear on packaging and in shops alongside the native words.

Six colors are adjectives, the rest are nouns

This is the grammar point that matters most. 赤, 青, 白 and 黒 each have a true i-adjective: 赤い (あかい), 青い (あおい), 白い (しろい) and 黒い (くろい). Two more colors become adjectives only with 色 attached: 黄色い (きいろい) and 茶色い (ちゃいろい). There is no word 黄い or 茶い. These six adjectives conjugate like any other i-adjective:

• 赤い車 (あかい くるま, a red car) and 車は赤いです (the car is red).
• 赤くない (not red), 赤かった (was red), 赤くなる (to turn red), as in 顔が赤くなる (かおが あかく なる, to blush).
• 白くて小さい犬 (しろくて ちいさい いぬ, a small white dog), joining with the くて form.

Every other color is a noun. To put it before another noun you need の, and to say that something is that color you simply add です: 緑の車 (みどりの くるま, a green car), 車は緑です (the car is green), 緑じゃない (not green). The same pattern covers 紫の, 灰色の, ピンクの and オレンジの. The six adjective colors can also be used as nouns with の when you treat the color as a thing, as in 赤の他人 (あかの たにん, a complete stranger), but in ordinary descriptions the い form is the default.

A quick test: if you can say the color with です and nothing else sounds wrong, it works as a noun too. 赤が好きです (あかが すきです, I like red) uses 赤 as a noun, while 赤い花 (あかい はな, a red flower) uses the adjective. Only 赤, 青, 白, 黒, 黄色 and 茶色 have both options.

Why 青 means blue and green

Ancient Japanese did not separate blue from green, and the word あお covered both. 緑 (みどり) appeared in the Heian period as a word for the fresh green of leaves and was long treated as a shade of 青. School materials that taught green and blue as different colors only became standard after the Second World War, so the older usage survives in a cluster of common words:

• 青信号 (あおしんごう), the green traffic light that means go. In 1973 Japanese officials decided the lamp should use the bluest shade of green allowed, which kept the signal green by international rules while matching the word people used.
• 青りんご (あおりんご), a green apple, and 青葉 (あおば), fresh green leaves.
• 青野菜 (あおやさい), green vegetables, and 青魚 (あおざかな), oily fish with blue-green backs.
• 青春 (せいしゅん), youth, where 青 carries the sense of something fresh and not yet ripe.

A green car, a green sweater or a green pen is 緑 today, and younger speakers reach for グリーン too. The safe rule is to learn 青 as blue, and then learn the green exceptions above as whole words rather than trying to reason them out.

The four oldest colors: light, dark, clear and vague

赤, 青, 白 and 黒 are the only colors with native い adjectives because they are the oldest Japanese color words, and they began as descriptions of light rather than hue. あか is linked to 明るい (あかるい, bright), くろ to 暗い (くらい, dark), しろ to things that are clear and distinct, and あお to everything faint and in between, which is why it stretched over the whole blue-green range. The link between 赤 and brightness still shows in words like 赤恥 (あかはじ, utter shame) and 赤裸々 (せきらら, naked and frank), where 赤 means complete or plain to see.

All four are among the first kanji any learner studies and each has its own page here: 赤 (7 strokes), 青 (8 strokes), 白 (5 strokes) and 黒 (11 strokes). They belong to the JLPT N5 kanji set, while 色, 茶, 黄 and 緑 come later. If you follow the N5 kanji study plan, the four colors sit in the week on describing things with 大, 小, 高 and 長.

Reading the color kanji in compounds

On their own, colors use their Japanese kun'yomi: あか, あお, しろ, くろ, き, みどり. In two-kanji compounds they usually switch to the Chinese on'yomi, the same rule covered in onyomi vs kunyomi. The two readings to learn for each are:

• 赤 あか, セキ: 赤字 (あかじ, a deficit, red ink), 赤道 (せきどう, the equator).
• 青 あお, セイ: 青空 (あおぞら, blue sky), 青年 (せいねん, a young man).
• 白 しろ, ハク: 白黒 (しろくろ, black and white), 白紙 (はくし, blank paper).
• 黒 くろ, コク: 黒字 (くろじ, a surplus, black ink), 黒板 (こくばん, a blackboard).
• 黄 き, オウ: 黄色 (きいろ, yellow), 黄金 (おうごん, gold).
• 緑 みどり, リョク: 緑茶 (りょくちゃ, green tea), 新緑 (しんりょく, fresh spring greenery).
• 茶 チャ: お茶 (おちゃ, tea), 茶色 (ちゃいろ, brown). This one has no common kun'yomi.

Notice the rendaku in 青空: そら becomes ぞら after 青. The kanji themselves give useful hints. 緑 and 紫 both carry the thread radical 糸, a hint that they were dye colors, and 黒 has the fire component 灬 at the bottom, which many learners remember as soot. The kanji radicals guide shows how to spot these parts.

色: the word for color itself

色 is read いろ on its own and ショク or シキ in compounds. 何色 (なにいろ) asks what color something is, and the answer is the color word plus です. 色々 (いろいろ, various) is one of the first words every learner meets, and 景色 (けしき, scenery) is a common word where 色 takes the シキ reading. 色 also forms the pattern for describing any shade: 金色 (きんいろ), 銀色 (ぎんいろ), 水色 (みずいろ) and 桃色 (ももいろ) all follow it.

• これは何色ですか。(これは なにいろ ですか, What color is this?)
• 青です。(あお です, It is blue.)
• 赤いかばんと黒い靴を買いました。(あかい かばんと くろい くつを かいました, I bought a red bag and black shoes.)
• 緑のシャツはありますか。(みどりの シャツは ありますか, Do you have this shirt in green?)

Colors are a good first set of kanji to practice writing, because 白, 赤 and 青 are short and appear in dozens of signs, menus and labels. Moji includes the four N5 colors in its first lessons, with stroke-order writing practice and spaced repetition reviews, so the compounds above come back at the right intervals.