colour
noun, adjective, verb
colour is a noun meaning “Commonwealth and Ireland standard spelling of color” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-O-L-O-U-R and has 2 syllables, and it appears 31 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of colour is colours.
What does colour mean?
noun
- 1
Commonwealth and Ireland standard spelling of color.
adjective
- 1
Commonwealth and Ireland standard spelling of color.
verb
- 1
Commonwealth and Ireland standard spelling of color.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce colour?
Colour has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-colour.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of colour
- colours plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- color US
- colouring participle, present
- coloured participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is colour?
Colour appears 31 times per million words in written English, the 3,052nd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Words people confuse with colour
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
How do you abbreviate colour?
Wiktionary records one abbreviation of colour: col..
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).