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colorful

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkʌl.ə.fl̩//
  • United States//ˈkʌl.əɹ.fl̩//
  • //ˈkə.lə.fʊl//
  • //kəˈlɜʳ.fʊl//
  • /[kɐ.lɜ(ː)(ɾ).fʊl]/

Possessing prominent and varied colors.

adjective

  1. 1

    Possessing prominent and varied colors.

    a colourful display of flowers

    It was a colourful vase with red and white hoops on the lid, and red bands above and below the main frieze. These bands also carry a metope pattern in white of triple lines and blobs, which can just be distinguished on the photographs.

    [Sen. John Curtis] gives colorful socks to other lawmakers on their birthdays.

    Blue and gold macaws are not native to Caracas. But over the past two decades their numbers in Venezuela's capital have skyrocketed, with hundreds of these birds now flying freely across the city, and dazzling locals with their colorful feathers and peculiar calls.

  2. 2

    Interesting, multifaceted, energetic, distinctive.

    He had a colourful career in the music industry.

    One of the most colourful people in motor racing, he writes in a colourful manner.

  3. 3

    Profane, obscene, offensive (usually in the phrase colourful language).

    Hussain celebrated reaching his ton with a gesture towards the media centre, pointing to the number three on the back of his shirt and offering some colourful language.

Etymology

From color + -ful.

Forms

comparative
more colorful
superlative
most colorful
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).