colored

adj

1. (US)Having a color.

   “Wash colored items separately from whites and darks to prevent the colors from bleeding.”

2. (US, in-compounds)Having a particular color or kind of color.

   “The room was red, with a dark-colored rug.”

   “Nara and its deer are so closely associated that the light-brown colored animals are pictured in the city’s tourism ads, on buses, train tickets and more.”

3. (US)Having prominent colors; colorful.

   “The singer wore a colored shirt.”

4. (US)Biased; pervasively (but potentially subtly) influenced in a particular way.

   “Mr. Brewer gave me his version of the history of the Conference of Studio Unions. It appeared to me then and appears to me now to have been a very colored view.”

   “But by and large, a majority of Sanduskians never read any newspaper other than the local journal and I am convinced that they get a far more colored view of national news than they did when the city had competing dailies.”

   “The organization's traditions and culture are inwardly focused. It is not conceivable that an alternative solution could exist. This results in a very colored view of the marketplace.”

5. (US, dated, offensive, usually)Of skin color other than white; in particular, black.

   “[…] a beautiful silk standard donated to the Third Battalion by the colored ladies of the city of New York, was formally presented to the battalion.”

   “He made a smart remark about colored people and I got mad. I got mad because I like colored people. In fact, a colored lady raised me. Some of my best friends are colored people.”

   “To find a job is like a haystack needle / Because where he lives they don't use colored people”

6. (Botswana, Namibia, South-Africa, US, Zimbabwe, capitalized, sometimes)Belonging to a multiracial ethnic group or category, having ancestry from more than one of the racial groups of Southern Africa (black, white, and Asian). (Under apartheid, used as a metadescription for mixed-race people and peoples such as the Cape Coloureds.)

   “Most of the colored community speaks Afrikaans, whereas languages like Xhosa or Venda are typically spoken by blacks and English is spoken mostly by whites.”

   “By the end of the 19th century District Six had become a bustling and heavily populated working class neighborhood whose population was predominantly coloured, Cape Malay and African intermixed with Indian, Chinese, and European migrants.”

   “By 1929, many of the Coloured radicals who had been excluded from the ICU had found a temporary home in the Western Cape branch of the African National Congress (ANC).”

7. (US, historical)Designated for use by colored people (in either the US or South African sense).

   “a colored drinking fountain”

   “a colored hospital”

   “New Orleans is a very dull town. It’s against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary.”

8. (alt-of, not-comparable)Alternative letter-case form of colored (“non-white, or mixed race”).

noun

1. (US)A colored article of clothing.
2. (South-Africa, US)A person having ancestry from more than one of the racial groups of Southern Africa (black, white, and Asian); a colored person.
3. (US, dated, offensive)A colored (nonwhite) person.

   “When a white fellow gets in the ring with an eight ball the eight ball's got no chance. You see, 'cause they call boxing the sweet science. And that's where your colored just runs into trouble. That's just that science part. / Yeah, but Joe Louis is a big 'un.”

verb

1. (US, form-of, participle, past)simple past and past participle of color