Qui tire légèrement sur le gris.
Slightly grey in color.
Couldn’t load the audio. Please try again.
See how the word “grisâtre” is used in sentences
Le ciel a pris un bleu grisâtre. — The sky turned a greyish blue.
Pourquoi l'eau de l'étang est-elle si grisâtre ? — Why is the water in the pond so greyish?
Il portait une veste grisâtre qui avait connu des jours meilleurs. — He wore a greyish jacket that had seen better days.
Check a word only if you could give at least one of its meanings.
words — the estimated size of your passive French vocabulary
Turn the gaps into your vocabulary
Download the app for free French vocabulary testGrisâtre is not the neutral word that greyish is. The suffix -âtre carries a faint note of disapproval, and French runs it across the whole colour range — blanchâtre, jaunâtre, verdâtre, rougeâtre all describe a colour that has gone slightly wrong. Une eau grisâtre is water you would not drink.
For plainly slightly grey, with no judgement in it, French says gris clair or tirant sur le gris. And un temps grisâtre covers more than the sky: it is the flat, low-spirited feel of the whole day.
gris grey
The colour itself, neutral. Grisâtre adds the shade of “and not pleasantly so”.
gris terne dull grey
Says the drabness outright instead of hiding it in a suffix. Safer when you only mean the colour.
grisonnant greying, of hair
Hair going grey is grisonnant, never grisâtre — that would mean it looks dirty.
grisaille greyness, dreariness
The noun for the mood grisâtre describes: la grisaille de novembre.
Your own vocabulary
Learn the words you actually need
A ready-made word card
Translation, examples and audio appear on their own
We help you not forget
We bring words back to practice at the right moment
Add real-life words — VibeLing reinforces them until they become automatic.
Add “grisâtre” to your vocabulary and learn it with translation, audio and spaced repetition — right in the app.
