colour

«colour» in Mova's school dictionary: what you see as red, blue, green, yellow and so on — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (colour, colours); verb (colour, colours, coloured, colouring)

meaning for a pupil

1) Colour is what you see as red, blue, green, yellow and so on. tree →

2) To colour is to fill in a picture with crayons, pencils or paint. tree →

3) Colour is the British way to spell color. tree →

sense in the lessons

maths: a property that sorts things into groups; colouring parts of shapes for fractions; sorting and tally charts by colour; science: the colours of the rainbow, mixing colours, light; art: primary colours red, yellow and blue; everyday life: traffic light colours, favourite colour; safety: bright colours help drivers see you

examples

• The bag has beads of 3 colours. tree →
• Colour 2 of the 5 squares. tree →
• How many of each colour? tree →
• She has 6 colours of paint. tree →
• The rainbow has 7 colours. tree →
• Red and yellow mixed make orange. tree →
• My favourite colour is green. tree →
• Wear bright colours when you cycle. tree →
• He caught four, one of each colour. tree →

note

Sorts things into groups. Trap: the number of colours is not the number of things. British «colour», US «color»; both are right.

In the corpora

• Laundry means sorting colours, reading labels and choosing the right temperature; a red sock in a white wash turns everything pink.
• Bots learned from British and American English and may mix spellings like "colour" and "color".
• Mixing all colours of LIGHT is different and makes white.
• Mixing many paint colours together makes brown or grey, because each paint soaks up different parts of the light.
• Printers use cyan, magenta and yellow instead, which mix cleaner colours.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «colour» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.