Definition of "yellow"

A sweaty reaper from his tillage brought / First fruits, the green ear and the yellow sheaf.

1667, John Milton, “Book X”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […]; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, line 434

Red o'er the forest glows the setting sun, / The line of yellow light dies fast away / That crown'd the eastern copse, and chill and dun / Falls on the moor the brief November day.

1827, [John Keble], “Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity”, in The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume II, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J. Parker; and C[harles] and J[ohn] Rivington, […], page 85

There's a one-eyed yellow idol / To the north of Kathmandu; / There's a little marble cross below the town; / And a brokenhearted woman / Tends the grave of 'Mad' Carew, / While the yellow god for ever gazes down.

1911, J. Milton Hayes, The green eye of the little yellow god

dorrẹ̅, dōrī adj. & n. […] Golden or reddish-yellow […] (a. 1398) *Trev. Barth. 59b/a: ȝelouȝ colour [of urine] […] tokeneþ febleness of hete […] dorrey & citrine & liȝt red tokeneþ mene.

1962 (quoting c. 1398 text), Hans Kurath & Sherman M. Kuhn, editors, Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, ISBN 978-0-472-01044-8, page 1242

What you should be is not yellow at all. If you're supposed to sock somebody in the jaw, and you sort of feel like doing it, you should do it.

1951, J. D. Salinger, chapter 13, in The Catcher in the Rye, Little, Brown and Company

You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you!

1975, Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The denizens of the gossipy world of the pink press, purple prose and yellow tabloids are shivering over disputed photographs of Princess Caroline of Monaco.

2004 October 4, Doreen Carvajal, “Photo edict muffles gossipy press”, in International Herald Tribune, retrieved 29 July 2008

They were all tall and all handsome, though they varied in their degree of darkness of skin, some being as dark as Mahomed, and some as yellow as a Chinese.

1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887

Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

1913, Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu‎

The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp.

1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 516

"Eh, Oscar—you hear about your yeller nephew?".

1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter VI, in Capricornia‎, page 64

A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me. “Give us a drink, yeller feller.”

1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins, published 2001, page 74

Charley threw her over for a yellow gal named Nancy: he never forgave Vashti for the vanishing from his life of a menace that had come to mean more to him than Vashti herself.

1933 September 9, James Thurber, “My Life and Hard Times—VI. A Sequence of Servants”, in The New Yorker

2012 March 2, Andrew Grice, “Yellow rebels take on Clegg over NHS 'betrayal'”, in The Independent

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Andrew Surman fired in what proved to be a 37th-minute winner before Forest's Paul Konchesky saw red late on. That second yellow for the loan signing came in stoppage time and did not affect the outcome of a game which Norwich dominated.

2011 April 15, Saj Chowdhury, “Norwich 2 - 1 Nott'm Forest”, in BBC Sport‎

Then suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows in from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath.

1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York: Review Books, published 2006, page 47

Interviews, clippings, yellowing stories from foreign newspapers, notebooks with old scribblings. Salisbury called it the debris of a reporter always too much on the run to sort out the paper, but there it was, an investigator's dream, […]

2013, Robert Miraldi, Seymour Hersh, Potomac Books, Inc., page 187