What are the colors in French?

The ten basic colors in French are: rouge (red), bleu (blue), jaune (yellow), vert (green), orange (orange), violet (purple), rose (pink), marron (brown), gris (grey) and blanc (white). The word for colour itself is la couleur, and the plural — les couleurs — is what you'll see on any French classroom poster.

How do you pronounce the French colors?

Roughly: rouge (roozh), bleu (bluh), jaune (zhohn), vert (vair — the final t is silent), orange (oh-rahnzh), violet (vyoh-leh — silent t), rose (rohz), marron (mah-rohn), gris (gree — silent s), blanc (blahn — silent c). The silent final consonants are what most beginners get wrong.

Do colors go before or after the noun in French?

After the noun, unlike English. You say une voiture rouge (a red car), un pull bleu (a blue jumper) and des yeux verts (green eyes) — never une rouge voiture. Colour adjectives are one of the clearest cases of the French after-the-noun rule.

Do French colors change in the feminine?

Most do: vert becomes verte, bleu becomes bleue, gris becomes grise, violet becomes violette and blanc becomes blanche. Colours that already end in -e (rouge, jaune, rose) don't change in the feminine. All of them add -s in the plural, except gris, which already ends in -s.

Why don't orange and marron change in French?

Because they are really nouns being used as colours — une orange is the fruit and un marron is a chestnut. Colours borrowed from an object stay invariable: des chaussures marron, des rideaux orange, with no -e and no -s. Rose is the famous exception: it comes from the flower but behaves like a normal adjective, so you do write des chaussures roses.

How do you ask what colour something is in French?

Say C'est de quelle couleur ? (what colour is it?) or, about a specific object, De quelle couleur est ta voiture ? To ask someone's favourite, use Quelle est ta couleur préférée ? — and answer with Ma couleur préférée, c'est le bleu, using le or la before the colour.

Colors in French: Les Couleurs in 10 Words

Colours are one of the first things you can actually use in French — to point at something in a shop, describe a person, or answer a question without knowing much grammar yet. In my new video I show the ten basic ones, each with a picture: a rose for rouge, a butterfly for bleu, lemons for jaune. This guide adds the pronunciation and the two small rules that make colours sound correct instead of textbook-wrong.

🎬 Les couleurs — the 10 basic French colours, one by one. Say each one out loud after me.

The 10 colors in French

Here are the ten colours from the video with an English-friendly pronunciation. The trap in almost every one of them is the silent final consonant — vert is "vair", not "vert".

rouge — red (roozh)
bleu — blue (bluh)
jaune — yellow (zhohn)
vert — green (vair — silent t)
orange — orange (oh-rahnzh)
violet — purple (vyoh-leh — silent t)
rose — pink (rohz)
marron — brown (mah-rohn)
gris — grey (gree — silent s)
blanc — white (blahn — silent c)

The word for colour itself is la couleur, and a colour poster in a French classroom is headed les couleurs. Two more you'll need almost immediately: noir (black, nwar) and beige (bezh).

Rule 1: the colour comes after the noun

English puts the colour first — a red car. French does the opposite:

une voiture rouge — a red car
un pull bleu — a blue jumper
une robe blanche — a white dress
des yeux verts — green eyes

Saying une rouge voiture is the single most common beginner mistake with colours. Put the object first, the colour second, and you already sound French.

Rule 2: the colour agrees with the noun

A colour in French is an adjective, so it changes to match the thing it describes — feminine gets -e, plural gets -s:

bleu → une chemise bleue, des rideaux bleus
vert → une pomme verte, des yeux verts
gris → une veste grise (plural stays gris — it already ends in -s)
violet → une fleur violette (double the t)
blanc → une chemise blanche (irregular — learn this one by heart)

The easy ones are rouge, jaune and rose: they already end in -e, so the feminine looks identical. Only the plural -s gets added.

The two colours that never change: orange and marron

This is the detail that makes a written sentence look properly French. Orange and marron aren't really colour words — they are objects: une orange is the fruit, un marron is a chestnut. A colour borrowed from an object stays frozen, with no -e and no -s:

des chaussures marron — brown shoes (never marrons)
des rideaux orange — orange curtains (never oranges)

And then the exception to the exception: rose comes from the flower but has been a normal adjective for centuries, so it does agree — des chaussures roses. Same for mauve and pourpre.

Asking and answering about colour

C'est de quelle couleur ? — What colour is it?
De quelle couleur est ta voiture ? — What colour is your car?
Quelle est ta couleur préférée ? — What's your favourite colour?
Ma couleur préférée, c'est le bleu. — My favourite colour is blue.
Je cherche le même en noir, s'il vous plaît. — I'm looking for the same one in black, please.

Notice that last pattern: when you talk about a colour as a thing in itself, it takes le — le bleu, le rouge. Colours are masculine as nouns.

5 colour expressions French people actually say

avoir une peur bleue — to be terrified (literally "a blue fear")
voir la vie en rose — to see life through rose-tinted glasses, as in the Édith Piaf song
être vert de rage — to be furious (French turns green with rage, not red)
une nuit blanche — a sleepless night, a night spent entirely awake
un steak bleu — a steak cooked barely at all, one step rarer than saignant

One more you'll hear every winter: il fait gris— "it's grey out" — which is how the French describe an overcast day. It belongs with the rest of the weather vocabulary in French.

Practise them out loud

The fastest way to fix colours is to walk around your room naming things: le mur blanc, la porte marron, les rideaux bleus — object first, colour second, agreement at the end. Play the video again and repeat each colour after me before you try the sentences. If you want real feedback on your pronunciation, I teach one-to-one online and you can book a free 30-minute trial lesson. To keep building vocabulary, carry on with basic French words for beginners and animals in French.