How To Name And Pronounce Colors In Italian

Imagine, stretched out before you, row upon row of gelato options. You reach the front of the line and wish to make your selection, but you have trouble indicating which flavor you want. The labels are hard to see, and pointing doesn’t seem to be working. Think how much easier it could be if you just knew the words to say that you wanted “the yellow one.” This may be a fanciful example, but learning the colors in Italian can come in handy in many situations.

As a brief note on usage, the color word often comes after the noun that it is describing. So “the red cat” is il gatto rosso. If you want to say “the light red cat,” the word for light comes at the end, so il gatto rosso chiaro. One exception to that is light blue, which has its own word that you can see below. And lastly, the color word has to agree with the gender of the noun, so with a feminine noun like macchina, or “car,” it would be described as la macchina rossa instead of la macchina rosso. With that in mind, here are some colors in Italian to get you started!

the color — il colore

red — rosso

orange — arancione

yellow — giallo

green — verde

blue — blu

light blue — azzurro

dark blue — blu scuro

purple — viola

pink — rosa

brown — marrone

black — nero

white — bianco

light — chiaro

dark — scuro

Note: The versions of the colors above are all in their singular, masculine form. But depending on the noun that the color is describing, some of the colors will change. Red, for example, is rosso in singular, masculine; rossa for singular, feminine; rossi for masculine, plural; and rosse for feminine plural. Most of the colors that end in -o follow a similar pattern, while some (like blu and arancione) don’t change at all. So make sure to be aware of the noun you’re describing when using color words!