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beige

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɛjʒ//
  • United Kingdom//ˈbɛjd͡ʒ//
  • United States//ˈbeɪʒ//
  • United States//ˈbeɪd͡ʒ//
  • Australia//ˈbæɪʒ//

A colour, variously defined from a pale brown, to a yellow greyish off-white.

noun

  1. 1

    A colour, variously defined from a pale brown, to a yellow greyish off-white.

  2. 2

    Debeige; a kind of woollen or mixed dress goods.

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from French (dialectal) beige, from Old French bege (“color of undyed wool or cotton”), from an Alpine language (compare Franco-Provençal bézho, Romansch besch (“dull grey”)), from Vulgar Latin *bysseus (“cottony grey”) (compare French bis, Catalan bis, Italian bigio), from Late Latin byssus (“cotton”), from Ancient Greek βύσσος (bússos, “cotton homespun”), from Semitic (compare Hebrew/Aramaic בוץ (būṣ)). Doublet of bice.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having a slightly yellowish gray colour, as that of unbleached wool.

    Dagobert had only one customer, an American who wore square, rimless glasses and a beige suit and looked like a Wall Street tycoon.

    Mr. Lauwaert of Sony said he realized that most consumers were not going to buy computers that cost far more than discount beige boxes.

  2. 2

    informalComfortably dull and unadventurous, in a way that suggests middle-class suburbia.

    Think about it: he grew up in Iowa, the beigest of states, was doted on, loved generously by his parents, the top of his class, probably voted Most Handsome of 2000.

    In the beigest parts of suburbia where I grew up, bridge was a game played by groups of parents in recreation rooms furnished with upright pianos and souvenir sombreros.

    For a meal of relentlessly beige food, may I suggest the beigest of wines? That would be chardonnay, which will go beautifully with Melissa Clark’s chicken potpie.

    He has no criminal record. He has no traffic tickets. His social media posts are just like... he's beige.

Forms

plural
beiges
comparative
beiger, more beige
superlative
beigest, most beige
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).