The Manx colour words are ny daahghyn. Most are attested in Cregeen’s dictionary of 1835, which places them firmly on the historical side of the language.
Every entry carries its pronunciation in the International Phonetic Alphabet, a plain English approximation, and the source it is attested in. [H] marks a form attested in the historical record. Where a pronunciation is marked not yet sourced, no dictionary we hold records it and we would rather leave the gap visible than invent one. See The Manx Alphabet and Pronunciation for why guessing from the spelling does not work.
The colours
| English | Manx | Pronunciation | English approximation | Attested in | Tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| white | bane | /bɛːn/ | “bairn”, long open a | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| black | doo | /dau̯/ north · /duː/ south | “dow” or “doo” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| red | jiarg | /dʒarɡ/ | “jarg” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| green | geayney | not yet sourced | — | Cregeen 1835 · Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| blue | gorrym | /ɡorəm/ | “GOR-um” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| yellow | buigh | not yet sourced | — | Kelly 1866 | [H] |
| grey | lheeah | /lʲiə/ | “LYEE-uh” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| brown | dhone | /doːn/ | “doan” | Cregeen 1835 | [H] |
| purple | doo-gorrym · gorrym-jiarg | not yet sourced | — | Kelly 1866 lists both | [H] |
Two colours worth a second look
Purple is two words, and both are old. Kelly’s 1866 dictionary lists doo-gorrym, literally “black-blue”, crediting it to Cregeen, and separately gorrym-jiarg, literally “blue-red”. Neither is a modern coinage. Manx, like many languages, described purple by combining the colours it sits between, and did so in more than one way.
Green is a boundary, not a point. Beside geayney, Cregeen also records glass for the green or grey of natural things: growing grass, the sea, a living creature. The split runs closely parallel to Irish uaine against glas. English does not divide colour this way, so the mapping is not one to one, and a dictionary gloss of “green” flattens something real.
⚠️ Three pronunciations are still open: geayney, buigh and the purple compounds. None of the dictionaries we hold record pronunciation, so these wait on Kneen’s Pronouncing Dictionary (1938) or on native-speaker recordings. Cregeen’s variant bwee for yellow also needs checking: in Kelly the same spelling appears in a list of trees, so the two may be unrelated words.