Word.ws English Dictionary

black and blue

black and blue adjective: of a person, having obvious bruises of the skin, typically from falling or being hit or punched.

Adjective

black and blue (not comparable)

  1. (colloquial) Of a person, having obvious bruises of the skin, typically from falling or being hit or punched.
    • My arm is still black and blue from slipping on the ice yesterday.
    • The whole benighted, blooming crew,
      The Puddin'-thieves, the Usher too,
      Are being beaten black and blue
      With bottles on the pate.1918, Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 167

Verb

black and blue (third-person singular simple present black and blues, present participle black and blueing or black and bluing, simple past and past participle black and blued)

  1. (colloquial, slang) To bruise, to strike (a person in such a way as to discolour the skin without breaking it).
    • ... he black-and-blued her eyes he cooked a big meal to make it up to her. He went out and stole a neighbor's hog or caught some rice birds ... This was a country of rice plantations, but Twig and Peggy lived upriver, where rice[…]1991, John Vernon, Peter Doyle: A Novel, Random House (NY)
    • Come on through I black and blue your whole crew
      Then I get Rudy with the Hong Kong Phoo'1995, Ol' Dirty Bastard, “Protect Ya Neck II the Zoo”, in Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

Forms of black and blue

Adjective
alternative attributiveblack-and-blue
Verb
third-person singular presentblack and blues
present participleblack and blueing
present participleblack and bluing
past participleblack and blued
pastblack and blued

Origin of black and blue

From Middle English blak and blo, blac and bla (“very dark, bruised”), equivalent to black + and + blow (dialectal term for blue). By surface analysis, black + and + blue.

Questions about black and blue

What does black and blue mean?
Black and blue means of a person, having obvious bruises of the skin, typically from falling or being hit or punched.
What part of speech is black and blue?
Black and blue can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near black and blue in the dictionary

  1. Black Africa
  2. black alder
  3. black alder winterberry
  4. black alders
  5. black amber
  6. black and blue
  7. black and brown
  8. black and burst
  9. Black and Decker
  10. Black and Deckers
  11. black and gold garden spider

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: black and blue (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-black and blue.wav.

Cite this entry: “black and blue.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/black_and_blue. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.