Color words are one of the most useful tools we have for identifying things. It’s a lot easier to say “I’ll have the blue one” than “I’ll take that roundish one, with the rough edges, to the left of the rectangular one.” Thus, learning how to name and pronounce colors in German is a useful skill to have in your back pocket. Really, after figuring out how to say “hello,” it’s probably one of the first things you should conquer.

A brief usage note: colors in German are adjectives and so, for the most part, they come before the noun when you’re describing something. “The red car” would be “das rote Auto.” Here, there is also often an ending -e added when the color comes before a noun. And when you want to say “light blue” or “dark blue” the words for “light” and “dark” are appended to the front of the color word, as you see with hellblau (light blue). With that knowledge, here are the basic terms to get you started as you learn German.

How Do You Say The Colors In German?

the color — die Farbe
red — rot
orange — orange
yellow — gelb
green — grün
blue — blau
light blue — hellblau
dark blue — dunkelblau
purple — lila
pink — rosa
brown — braun
black — schwarz
white — weiß
light — hell
dark — dunkel

Conjugating The Colors: Using Black And White In German

We covered the basic forms of the colors above, but if you want to use them in a sentence, things get a little more complicated. While in English the word “blue” is always going to be “blue” no matter what object it describes, most German color words need to change depending on the noun it’s referring to. That means the ending of the color changes with examples using “white” and “black” in German:

• For masculine nouns, feminine and neuter nouns in the nominative case, the color ends in -e. For example, der schwarze Hund or der weiße Hund.
• For plural nouns in the nominative case, the color ends in -en. For example, die schwarzen Häuser or die weißen Häuser.

The topic of colors becomes more complex when you take into account they also have different endings depending on if it’s in the nominative, accusative, genitive or dative case. To keep things simple, here’s how the colors are conjugated in the nominative case with the indefinite article. The important thing to know is that colors work the same as other adjectives in German, all of which requires a lot of memorization of rules.

Note: You only conjugate the color when it appears right before the noun. If you were to say “The cat is white,” it would be Die Katze ist weiß.

There are also a few colors that are “invariable,” meaning that they don’t change depending on the noun they describe. These include rosa (“pink”), lila (“purple”) and orange (“orange”).

German Colors Quiz

Thing you’ve learned everything there is to know about German colors? Take this short quiz to see how much you’ve retained. If you don’t have everything down just yet, don’t worry, you’ll know them in no time!