Word.ws English Dictionary

colored outside the lines

colored outside the lines is the simple past and past participle of color outside the lines.

Meaning of color outside the lines

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
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see color, outside, lines.

Questions about colored outside the lines

What is colored outside the lines the simple past and past participle of?
Colored outside the lines is the simple past and past participle of color outside the lines.

Words near colored outside the lines in the dictionary

  1. colored eggs
  2. colored gold
  3. colored golds
  4. colored in
  5. colored inside the lines
  6. colored outside the lines
  7. colored pencil
  8. colored pencils
  9. Colored People Time
  10. Colored People's Time
  11. colored up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: colored outside the lines (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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