parauri

Etymology

para (“yellow, dirt, silt”) +‎ uri (“dark, deep [of colour]”) thus ‘dark yellow’^[1] – compare with paraumu “topsoil” (lit. ‘soil of the umu’) and parā “to turn yellow of dirt, to ripe”. Similar connections of yellow and brown can be found within other languages of the same Austronesian family: Malay for example has kuning tanah (lit. “dirt yellow”) referring to hex colour #eeb261^[2] which can be perceived as brownish to Westerners.

Adjective

parauri

1. dark (of skin colour)

Noun

parauri

1. brown^[1]

See also

References

Further reading

• Williams, Herbert William (1917) “parauri”, in A Dictionary of the Maori Language, page 308
• “parauri” in John C. Moorfield, Te Aka: Maori–English, English–Maori Dictionary and Index, 3rd edition, Longman/Pearson Education New Zealand, 2011, →ISBN.