Word.ws English Dictionary

code yellow

code yellow noun: the situation where a person urinates in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.

Noun

code yellow (uncountable)

  1. (humorous) The situation where a person urinates in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.

Origin of code yellow

Perhaps originally a code used for this situation in some hospitals, or named in imitation of hospital codes and in reference to the yellow colour of urine. (Hospitals today use code yellow for various things including an emergency requiring all personnel to report to the hospital, a bomb threat requiring all personnel to evacuate the hospital, an indication that a patient should be prioritized, an animal being loose, etc.)

Questions about code yellow

What does code yellow mean?
Code yellow means the situation where a person urinates in an undesirable location (e.g. hospital bed or retail store), requiring cleanup.
What part of speech is code yellow?
Code yellow is a noun.

Words near code yellow in the dictionary

  1. code up
  2. code wheel
  3. code wheels
  4. code word
  5. code words
  6. code yellow
  7. code-behind
  8. code-first
  9. code-lift
  10. code-lifted
  11. code-lifting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: code yellow (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-code yellow.wav.

Cite this entry: “code yellow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/code_yellow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.