colored
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "colored", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "colored" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "colored" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
colored is anEnglishadj. It means: Having a color. Pronounced /ˈkʌləɹd/. It ranks #5,202 in English word frequency. Often confused with colors and cooked.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | colored |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | /ˈkʌləɹd/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #5,202 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 10 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for colored is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkʌləɹd/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,202 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for colored, with forms such as "ccolored", "cloored", and "collored". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 10 confusable-pair relationships, "colors", "cooked", "cooled", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From color + -ed. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is colored, spelled C-O-L-O-R-E-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Having a color.
- 2Having a particular color or kind of color.
- 3Having prominent colors; colorful.
- 4Biased; pervasively (but potentially subtly) influenced in a particular way.
- 5Of skin color other than white; in particular, black.
- 6Belonging to a multiracial ethnic group or category, having ancestry from more than one of the racial groups of Southern Africa (black, white, and Asian). (Under apartheid, used as a metadescription for mixed-race people and peoples such as the Cape Coloureds.)
- 7Designated for use by colored people (in either the US or South African sense).
Etymology
From color + -ed.
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccolored,cloored,collored,coloerd,colorde,coloredd,colorred,colroed,coolred,oclored
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for colored
Misspelling Variants of "colored"
Frequency rank: #5,202 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: