The Metaphorical Meanings of the Color Term Black

This paper is to demonstrate the varied metaphorical meaning of the color term black. Despite the fact that colors play an important role in everyday life and occur everywhere, they do not receive much attention. Therefore, using the example of black the author’s intention is to illustrate the importance of a color and the correlations people unconsciously make. First of all, with the help of some literature and common phrases in society, positive and negative associations of black are collected. Afterwards the grouped characteristic significances of black are compared to two dictionaries, namely the Oxford English Dictionary and the Longman English Dictionary to see if there is a difference between the symbolism of black and its original denotation. Following the metaphorical meanings of black are collocated by means of The Corpus of Contemporary American English to analyze its actual occurrences in language use. Concluding, black has a wide range of meanings, but is predominantly combined with a negative connotation. Some associations only exist in society or special literature, because the transfer to sorrow or death cannot be found in a dictionary or corpus. This is because dictionaries and the corpus cover the general and literal linguistic usage of black and not its entire symbolism, which arose over a period of years and does not explicitly contain the word black.