Dutch color vocabulary is largely transparent for English speakers, with many words being clear cognates. Basic colors: rood (red), blauw (blue), groen (green), geel (yellow), oranje (orange), paars (purple), roze (pink), wit (white), zwart (black), grijs (grey), bruin (brown), beige (beige). Note that oranje is both the color and the Dutch football team’s color — deeply culturally loaded.
Shades and modifications follow a productive pattern: licht- (light) and donker- (dark) prefix any color: lichtblauw (light blue), donkergroen (dark green), lichtgrijs (light grey). More specific shades: marineblauw (navy blue), bordeauxrood (bordeaux red), turquoise (turquoise), okerkleurig (ochre-colored). The suffix -ig creates adjectives from nouns: roodachtig (reddish), blauwachtig (bluish).
Colors in Dutch follow the normal adjective inflection rules — they add -e when attributive: “een rode auto” (a red car), “het blauwe huis” (the blue house — het-noun, so -e with definite article). In idiomatic expressions: iets rooskleurig inzien (to see something through rose-tinted glasses), groen van jaloezie (green with jealousy), rood aanlopen (to blush / turn red). These idioms use colors metaphorically in ways that broadly parallel English.