Word.ws English Dictionary

of colour

of colour is the alternative spelling of of color.

Meaning of of color

Adjective

of color (not comparable)

  1. (US) Nonwhite; of a race other than white, for example black.
    • It is to him that we owe the story that Talleyrand outraged the susceptibilities of the Philadelphians by his open admiration for a woman of colour with whom he frequently appeared in public.1932, Duff Cooper, Talleyrand, Folio Society, published 2010, page 54
  2. (historical) Belonging to a category of people with mixed black and white ancestry in the Americas in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
    • [page 1:] Chap. 1. … The inhabitants of the French part of St. Domingo, as of all the West Indian Islands, were composed of three great classes: 1st, Pure whites. 2d, People of colour, and blacks of free condition. 3d, Negroes in a state of slavery. The reader is apprised that the class which, by a...1801 (edition; original c. 1793), Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies

Questions about of colour

What is of colour the alternative spelling of?
Of colour is the alternative spelling of of color.

Words near of colour in the dictionary

  1. of an
  2. of any use
  3. of blessed memory
  4. of choice
  5. of color
  6. of colour
  7. of consequence
  8. of counsel
  9. of course
  10. of course my horse
  11. of course, my horse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: of colour (page history and authors); of color (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: “of colour.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/of_colour. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.