puce

From French couleur puce, from Latin pūlex (“flea”).

• IPA^(key): /pjuːs/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (Scotland, Northern Ireland) IPA^(key): /ˈpjʉs/
• Rhymes: -uːs

puce (countable and uncountable, plural puces)

1. A brownish-purple color, sometimes more or less deep red or grayish.

   puce:  

   dark puce:  

   • 1881, Alvin Wood Chase, Dr. Chase's Recipes Or, Information for Everybody, page 596:

     For blacks, browns, puces, and violets, the acetate or tartrate of iron must be employed.

puce (comparative pucer, superlative pucest)

1. Of a brownish-purple color, sometimes more or less deep red or grayish.

• → Welsh: piws

• Appendix:Colors

Inherited from Old French puce, pulce, from Latin pūlicem, the accusative form of pūlex, from Proto-Indo-European *plúsis (“flea”).

• IPA^(key): /pys/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Homophones: puces, pusse, pussent, pusses

puce f (plural puces)

1. flea
2. chip (electronics), silicon chip
3. (typography) bullet
4. (endearing) sweetie (used to address a young girl, or a woman one is romantically involved with)

puce

1. inflection of pucer:
   1. first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
   2. second-person singular imperative

• “puce”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Inherited from Proto-Slavic *pǫtьce, a deminutive form of Proto-Slavic *pǫto. First attested in the 16th century.^[1]

• IPA^(key): /pût͡se/
• Hyphenation: pu‧ce

pȕce n (Cyrillic spelling пу̏це)

1. button

• “puce”, in Hrvatski jezični portal [Croatian language portal] (in Serbo-Croatian), 2006–2025
• Skok, Petar (1972) “puce”, in Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika [Etymological Dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian Language] (in Serbo-Croatian), volumes 2 (K – poni¹), Zagreb: JAZU, page 65

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

puce (Cyrillic spelling пуце)

1. inflection of puca:
   1. genitive singular
   2. nominative/accusative/vocative plural