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11 Colors, More Adjectives and Adverbs
Words for colors are adjectives as well. The main color adjectives in Croatian are:
bijel white
crn black
crven red
ljubičast violet
narančast orange ®
plavi blue
siv gray
smeđ brown ®
zelen green
žut yellow
For example:
Jabuka je crvena. The apple is red.
List je zelen. The leaf is green.
The adjective smeđ is one of adjectives that get an -e in neuter instead of the usual -
o:
Oko je smeđe. The eye is brown.
There’s a simple but effective rule to determine which adjectives get an -e: ones that
end in a Croatian-specific letter, that is, a letter that’s not pronounced like in English
or even does not exist in English. Beside smeđ, often used adjectives that get an -e
are:
loš bad vruć hot
(You’ll encounter more such adjectives as you go.)
If you want to say that something is e.g. dark green, put tamno- to the front of the
color adjective – the result is one, long word. Likewise, light + color is expressed
with svjetlo-:
Majica je tamnocrvena. The shirt is dark red.
Auto je svjetlozelen. The car is light green.
Two color adjectives have a specific meaning with some nouns, quite different from
usage in English:
plava kosa blond hair
crno vino red wine
Literally, in Croatian, wines can be ‘black’, and blond-haired people have ‘blue’ hair.
(If you want to know why, the adjective plavi meant pale thousand years ago.)
There’s another adjective for "color" that’s frequently used in Croatian:
šaren multicolored, motley
It doesn’t really translate into English: it’s used when in English you would describe
something having colored stripes or many colors, especially bright, live colors: