Word.ws English Dictionary

yellow cab

yellow cab noun: a yellow taxi, particularly officially licensed taxis in New York City and certain other jurisdictions.

yellow cab: a yellow taxi, particularly officially licensed taxis in New York City and certain other...
Image: Benoît Prieur, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

yellow cab (plural yellow cabs)

  1. (US) A yellow taxi, particularly officially licensed taxis in New York City and certain other jurisdictions.
  2. (Japanese, derogatory, ethnic, slur) An Asian woman who sleeps with white men, particularly such Japanese women when regarded as a race traitor.
    • Despite its ubiquity in 1990s Japanese culture, one telephone survey of 200 people conducted in the New York area did not find a single individual familiar with the use of the term "yellow cab" in reference to Japanese or Asian women.

Synonyms of yellow cab

Forms of yellow cab

pluralyellow cabs

Origin of yellow cab

Originally selected owing to yellow's high visibility and common in horsedrawn form in Paris and London in the 1800s and New York in the 1880s. Now chiefly associated with the yellow automotive taxicabs popularized around New York by the Yellow Taxicab Co. In reference to sexually available Asian women, a calque of Japanese イエローキャブ (ierō kyabu), from English yellow cab and popularized by Shōko Ieda's 1991 novel by that name, from its female characters' supposed "yellow" skin and the notion they provided "rides" to the general public.

Questions about yellow cab

What does yellow cab mean?
Yellow cab means a yellow taxi, particularly officially licensed taxis in New York City and certain other jurisdictions.
What part of speech is yellow cab?
Yellow cab is a noun.
What is the plural of yellow cab?
The plural of yellow cab is yellow cabs.

Words near yellow cab in the dictionary

  1. yellow bugle
  2. yellow bullhead
  3. yellow bullheads
  4. yellow bunting
  5. yellow buntings
  6. yellow cab
  7. yellow cabs
  8. yellow cake
  9. yellow cakes
  10. yellow card
  11. yellow cards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yellow cab (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-yellow cab.wav.

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