Rosado = color of roses
Dorado = color of gold ore
Anaranjado = color of an orange
What about “morado”? I know it means purple, but what is it describing, if anything, like in the examples above?
I’ve asked a few people who know a lot more Spanish than me, and the suggestions were “color of death”, “color of bruises”, and “color of the Moors”.
Any dopers with any idea?
There is a fruit, similar to the Mulberry, in Centrral America called “mora”. I suspect it might be an allusion to the color of that fruit.
Edit – a further search shows that the Mora is the Spanish name for the common blackberry.
Morado derives from the Latin mora, and mora from the Latin morum, referring to a plant.
Morado as a color derives from the color of the berry of a Southeast Asian plant, Morus nigra which is the black mulberry. The term was in use as such in Castillian from the mid fifteen century thus precluding any New World origin.
As mentioned, it’s the color of moras, meaning a kind of dark berry.
Actually I supect “moretones” to mean bruises works the other way around, that is, you refer to bruises by that word because they get black-and-blue.
The word they got from them is apparently “moreno”, which is still used to refer to dark-skinned people and is also a surname, because surnames often derive from physical characteristics. (“Talk to José.” “Which José?” “The José with dark skin. José Moreno.”)
They get black and blue in English; in Spanish they start morados and later get *amarillos *(usually there is a verde ring in between the amarillo and morado, during the transition), morados is a common name for bruises and moretón is more of a superb bruise, a “moradón”; -on is often an intensifier.
Lighter tones of purple would be called granate, grana, púrpura… rather than morado (for example, Barça’s azulgrana shirts, the bands are azul and grana(te)).
Moreno means dark-skinned (naturally or with a tan) but also dark-haired. When used to refer to black people it’s a pun, as in “the dude with the perma-super-tan”, and can be considered offensive (depends on context and tone, etc etc, but what I mean is, the speaker may not mean any offense and the listener may still take it).
Moretón is the standard word for “bruise” in Mexico.
In R A Lafferty’s Fifth Mansions, there is a mansion called "Morada."
Just quoted because I love Lafferty. He was learned in several languages but also a big joker; take his erudition with a grain of salt. (What a pity that most of his work is out of print, except for two slender volumes of short stories in exquisitely expensive editions. And Okla Hannali, sold by Amazon or the Choctaw Nation.
Morada means home as well as (f)purple, that bit of trivia is true. Morar is “to usually/frequently live in a place”, archaic but not so much that it wouldn’t be understood; nowadays you’d mostly find it in poetry. I was surprised by the “sojourn” bit as I thought a sojourn was a temporary thing whereas a morada is permanent. I know word meanings change and all that, but m-w gives “sojourn” as “a temporary stay” whereas RAE gives the closest meaning of morada as “place where someone stays for a relatively long time” - the time factor kind of makes them opposites, one is a temporary residence whereas the other is permanent. Maybe Lafferty was confused by the fact that in older stories, travelers would often look for a morada where they could stop - but it wasn’t their morada (home), it was that of those who’d let them stop in it for the night rather than sleeping outside; the term means that they’d be looking for private homes rather than inns (depending on where and when the story takes place, asking for an inn would have been unrealistic).
What I can’t remember right now is the name for when two words are morphologically identical but it’s a coincidence, as in this case.