yellow – English adjective declension

English adjective forms of yellow

Adjective: yellow

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Comparativeyellower
Superlativeyellowest

Perifrastic

Sample Sentences

  • He had a yellow laptop in his bag.
  • A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought / First fruits, the green ear and the yellow sheaf. [1667, John Milton, “Book X”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, line 434:]
  • 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. [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:]
  • 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. [1911, J. Milton Hayes, The green eye of the little yellow god:]
  • 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. [1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, chapter 13, in The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC:]
  • You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you! [1975, Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail:]
  • 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. [2004 October 4, Doreen Carvajal, “Photo edict muffles gossipy press”, in International Herald Tribune, retrieved 29 Jul 2008:]
  • 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. [1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:]
  • Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. [1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu:]
  • The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp. [1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 516:]
  • "Eh, Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?". [1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter VI, in Capricornia, page 64:]
  • A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me. “Give us a drink, yeller feller.” [1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins, published 2001, page 74:]
  • 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. [1933 September 9, James Thurber, “My Life and Hard Times—VI. A Sequence of Servants”, in The New Yorker:]
  • yellow constituencies
  • [2012 March 2, Andrew Grice, “Yellow rebels take on Clegg over NHS 'betrayal'”, in The Independent:]
  • the black–yellow coalition

Adjectives inflected like yellow

sallow, smooth, slight, sleigh, sordid, somber, shweet, shrill, shrewd, yellow, yaller, hard knock, DRY, Greek, cut short, unquiet, unclean, indiscreet, chipper, straicht, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)

Etymology

1. 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 *ǵʰelh₃wós, from *ǵʰelh₃- (“green, yellow”).
2. Cognate with Scots yella (“yellow”), North Frisian gööl, güül (“yellow”), Saterland Frisian jeel (“yellow”), West Frisian giel (“yellow”), Cimbrian gel, ghéel (“yellow”), Dutch geel (“yellow”), Dutch Low Saxon gael, gel (“yellow”), German gelb, gehl (“yellow”), German Low German gel, geel, gęl, gäl (“yellow”), Luxembourgish giel (“yellow”), Vilamovian gaoł (“yellow”), Yiddish געל (gel), געלב (gelb, “yellow”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish gul (“yellow”), Faroese and Icelandic gulur (“yellow”). Compare also Welsh gell (“bay, tawny”), Latin helvus (“dull yellow”), Irish geal (“white, bright”), Lithuanian žalias (“green”), Ancient Greek χλωρός (khlōrós, “light green”), Persian زرد (zard, “yellow”), Sanskrit हरि (hari, “greenish-yellow”), Russian жёлтый (žóltyj, “yellow”), Russian зелёный (zeljónyj, “green”). Not related to Italian giallo—see galbinus.
3. The verb is from Middle English yelwen, ȝalowen, ȝolewen, from Old English ġeolwian, from the adjective. See: Dutch Adjectives 'geel', German Adjectives 'gelb', Latin Adjectives 'helvus', Irish Adjectives 'geal'.

Verbs referencing "yellow"

German Adjectives gelb.