Word.ws English Dictionary

color outside the lines

color outside the lines verb: to behave in creative or unconventional ways, to break the rules.

Verb

color outside the lines (third-person singular simple present colors outside the lines, present participle coloring outside the lines, simple past and past participle colored outside the lines)

  1. (intransitive) To behave in creative or unconventional ways, to break the rules.
    • As one American problem-solving court judge put it: “We are the judges who get to color outside the lines.”2009, James L. Nolan Jr, Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International Problem-Solving Court Movement
    • It comes from the fact that skaters are more likely, as you say, to color outside the lines, and that inclination frightens and confuses most people and institutions.2007, Bret Anthony Johnston, Corpus Christi: Stories
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see color, outside, lines.

Forms of color outside the lines

third-person singular presentcolors outside the lines
present participlecoloring outside the lines
past participlecolored outside the lines
pastcolored outside the lines

Origin of color outside the lines

A reference to children's coloring books, which contain line drawings to be colored in.

Questions about color outside the lines

What does color outside the lines mean?
Color outside the lines means to behave in creative or unconventional ways, to break the rules.
What part of speech is color outside the lines?
Color outside the lines is a verb.
What is the past tense of color outside the lines?
The past tense of color outside the lines is colored outside the lines.

Words near color outside the lines in the dictionary

  1. color of authority
  2. color of law
  3. color of office
  4. color of someone's money
  5. color of title
  6. color outside the lines
  7. color pencil
  8. color pencils
  9. color photography
  10. color pop
  11. color pops

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: color outside the lines (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.

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Cite this entry: “color outside the lines.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/color_outside_the_lines. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.