colored

1. (US, now dated and usually offensive) Of skin color other than white; in particular, black.Examples: "[…] a beautiful silk standard donated to the Third Battalion by the colored ladies of the city of New York, was formally presented to the battalion."; "He made a smart remark about colored people and I got mad. I got mad because I like colored people. In fact, a colored lady raised me. Some of my best friends are colored people."; "To find a job is like a haystack needle / Because where he lives they don't use colored people"USdatedoffensiveusually

2. (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, sometimes capitalized) Belonging to a multiracial ethnic group or category, having ancestry from more than one of the racial groups of Southern Africa (black, white, and Asian). (Under apartheid, used as a metadescription for mixed-race people and peoples such as the Cape Coloureds.)Examples: "Most of the colored community speaks Afrikaans, whereas languages like Xhosa or Venda are typically spoken by blacks and English is spoken mostly by whites."; "By the end of the 19th century District Six had become a bustling and heavily populated working class neighborhood whose population was predominantly coloured, Cape Malay and African intermixed with Indian, Chinese, and European migrants."; "By 1929, many of the Coloured radicals who had been excluded from the ICU had found a temporary home in the Western Cape branch of the African National Congress (ANC)."Synonyms: EurafricanBotswanaNamibiaSouth-AfricaUSZimbabwecapitalizedsometimes

3. (chiefly historical) Designated for use by colored people (in either the US or South African sense).Examples: "a colored drinking fountain"; "a colored hospital"; "New Orleans is a very dull town. It’s against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary."UShistorical