Plural of colors. How is the plural of colors?

Perhaps some of your questions concern to the plural of colors? Don't worry, we'll get to know this linguistic fact better in this article, whose purpose is to bring you important colorful tips. So here they are:

When it comes to grammatical postulates, the subject in question is characterized by compound adjectives, which submit to that well-known rule, manifested by the fact that the inflection must refer to the last element, only. Proof of this is that we have "light green dresses" as well as "light green shirts" and so on.

When the color name “opts” to play the role of substantive, this occurrence is manifested by the use of a determinant, in this case, an article. Thus, according to grammatical precepts, the plural must be assigned to both elements of the compound, as, for example, in “the pale greens of all the dresses overlapped the other shades there gifts”.

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Continuing with our observations, it is worth emphasizing one more particularity, now manifested by the fact that if the second element of the compound is characterized by a

substantive, all of it (the compound in its entirety) will remain unchanged. In this case, we have “gold yellow, lime green, turquoise”, among other cases. This same rule also applies to cases where the noun indicates the color.

In this sense, it should be mentioned that there are “silver shoes, orange shirts, gray blouses”, etc. – always coloring the messages we utter, once adequate to the formal standard of language.


By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters

Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:

DUARTE, Vânia Maria do Nascimento. "Plural of colors"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/gramatica/plural-das-cores.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.

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