Piros or vörös: what is the difference between the two Hungarian words for red?

Use piros unless you have a reason not to: it is the ordinary, bright red of apples, cars, traffic lights and the Easter egg. Vörös is a darker red with a charge of passion or danger, and it is the only word in a set of names and compounds: Vöröskereszt (Red Cross), vörösbor (red wine), vörös hajú (red-haired), vörös csillag (the communist red star). Outside those fixed forms the two words overlap, and choosing between them is a matter of shade and mood rather than a rule.

The rule: piros by default, vörös for dark, dramatic or named reds

Both words translate as "red", and both are adjectives and nouns. They are pronounced [ˈpiroʃ] and [ˈvørøʃ]: Hungarian s is the English "sh" sound, and ö is a rounded front vowel (see the alphabet and pronunciation guide). Wiktionary glosses piros as "often specifically a lighter red than vörös" and vörös as "often specifically a darker red than piros". That is half the story. The other half is feeling: in a 2017 Lund University thesis, Jessica Presits found that vörös "denotes a darker shade of red than piros, and has connotations of sex/passion and danger".

So the choice works in three steps:

1. Is it a name or a compound? Then the word is already chosen: Vörös-tenger (Red Sea), pirospaprika (red paprika). Do not swap it.
2. Is the red dark, blood-like, or meant to sound passionate, political or menacing? Vörös is the natural word.
3. Anything else: piros. It is the far more frequent word and never sounds odd for an ordinary red object.

• Piros a lámpa, várj! The light is red, wait!
• Kérek egy pohár vörösbort. A glass of red wine, please.
• A lánynak vörös haja van. The girl has red hair.

Which red goes with which noun: the table

The first two columns are set forms, taken from the Wiktionary entries for both words and from Hungarian Wikipedia article titles. Proper names and one-word compounds never swap; for the phrases, the listed word is the established one. The third column holds nouns that take either word, with the number of hits for vörös + noun and piros + noun in the Hungarian National Corpus, as Presits reports them.

Read the third column as preference, not law. Stars, devils and carpets lean hard towards vörös. Apples, lamps, tomatoes and peppers are almost always piros. Flags, roses and eyes are genuinely split.

Shade: how dark is vörös?

In Presits's first study, eight native speakers named 16 shades of red on screen, each shown twice, answering "Piros vagy vörös vagy mi?" ("Piros or vörös or what?"). The pattern was clear even in a small group:

• Pure screen red (RGB 255, 0, 0) was called piros 14 times out of 16 and vörös once.
• Piros was "almost never used" once the red value fell below 200. Vörös was the most frequent answer for the darker shades RGB 200, 0, 0 and 200, 0, 50 and for 230, 0, 50.
• No shade leaning towards orange was ever called vörös. Those got piros, narancspiros or narancssárga (orange).
• The darkest reds were often bordó (burgundy) or barna (brown) rather than either red.

So vörös sits between bright piros and bordó. If you want to name a dark red without any drama, Hungarian also has sötétpiros ("dark piros"), listed among the compounds of piros on Wiktionary.

Connotation: passion, politics and danger

The main study had 30 native speakers in Budapest describe pictures of red objects in a game; none of them guessed afterwards what the test was for. Half the objects were "dangerous" or "sexy" (a red star, a devil, lips, a revealing dress, fire), half neutral (an apple, a car, a teddy bear). Each picture came in a bright red and a dark red.

Both factors raised the use of vörös, and the thesis reports both effects as statistically significant. Several participants said afterwards that they would call a dress vörös if it was sexy or provocative and piros if it was just a dress. One said she avoided vörös because it was "too dramatic". The rose was the outlier: 60% vörös even in bright red, and in a follow-up questionnaire 77% of 85 Hungarian speakers rated the red rose "passionate and/or erotic".

The etymology fits the mood. Wiktionary derives vörös from véres, "bloody", from vér, "blood", and quotes Anna Wierzbicka: piros is associated with blood inside the body, vörös with blood spilled, which darkens. Piros belongs to a different family: Wiktionary's first etymology gives it the same root as pirít (to toast), pirong (to blush with shame) and pirkad (to dawn).

Politics is where vörös is most fixed. The Wiktionary entry lists vörös csillag (red star), vörös zászló (red flag) and vörösterror (Red Terror), and the Hungarian Wikipedia article on the Soviet army is titled Munkás-paraszt Vörös Hadsereg. Even here the choice is not frozen: in the picture game the red star was piros about half the time, and Presits argues that piros is preferred when the star is "considered more neutral in a specific context".

Why two answers circulate, and which is right

Learners usually meet one of two explanations. Both are partly true; neither is the whole answer.

"Vörös is just dark red." This is close to what Berlin and Kay proposed in 1969, as Presits reports it: vörös as a kind of piros, the way crimson is a kind of red. The shade test supports a tendency, but people used vörös for bright red and piros for dark red too. A dark red apple was still piros 80% of the time.

"Vörös only appears in fixed phrases." Uusküla and Sutrop (2007) called it "by no means a basic colour word in Hungarian", and Benczes and Tóth-Czifra (2014) pointed to its idiomatic uses like vöröshagyma and the Red Army (both as summarised by Presits). But in the picture game, every one of the 20 objects except the tomato and the pepper was called vörös at least once, including a teddy bear and a dinosaur. Presits concludes that vörös is a full colour word, "generally (but not always)" darker than piros. A 2009 corpus count by Papp, also reported in the thesis, puts vörös 7th by corpus frequency among the basic colour words Berlin and Kay listed for Hungarian, ahead of barna (brown) and lila (purple), with piros 5th.

The working answer: piros is the neutral default, vörös is a live alternative that adds darkness or emotion, and a set of names and compounds has frozen one choice. That is why the table above has three columns rather than two.

Endings and derived words

Piros is a back-vowel word and vörös a front rounded one, so every suffix follows vowel harmony: a pirosban but a vörösben, a piroson but a vörösön. Wiktionary gives two declensions for each, and they differ in the accusative and the plural:

The adjective forms are the ones you need almost all the time: Az almák pirosak, a pirosat kérem ("I'd like the red one"). The comparative follows the normal -abb/-ebb pattern. Before a noun neither word takes an ending (a piros autóban); it only takes one when it stands alone, as the case overview explains, and the suffix builder produces the case forms of an adjective standing alone, such as a pirosat.

Each word also builds its own verbs and adjectives with the usual derivational suffixes:

• pirosas, vöröses reddish
• pirosodik, vörösödik to turn red
• pirosít to make red; also to rouge (lips or cheeks)
• pirul to blush; in cooking, to brown (related to piros, not built from it)

A blushing face is pirul, not a form of vörös: Elpirult, "she blushed".

Where these rules stop

• Overlap is real. Wiktionary lists piros rózsa and vörös rózsa as common collocations, one under each word. For roses, flags, eyes and stars, either word is correct.
• The studies are small. The shade test had eight participants and the picture game 30. They show a clear direction, not exact boundaries.
• The corpus counts are written Hungarian. They show what is common in texts, not what sounds natural in speech.
• Dark, bluish reds may be neither. Speakers in both studies kept reaching for bordó, and for a wine-coloured coat it is often the best word.

Sources and further reading

• Jessica Presits, "Sex, communism, and dangerous red things: On the semantics of the Hungarian words piros and vörös", BA thesis, Lund University, 2017. Source of the corpus counts and study results, and of the summaries of Berlin and Kay (1969), Uusküla and Sutrop (2007), Papp (2009) and Benczes and Tóth-Czifra (2014).
• Wiktionary, "piros" and "vörös": senses, etymology, declension, collocations and compounds
• Wiktionary, "pirosas", "pirosít", "pirosodik", "vörösödik" and "pirul"
• Wiktionary, "vörösbor", "vöröshagyma" and "róka"
• Wikipedia (Hungarian), "Magyar Vöröskereszt", "Munkás-paraszt Vörös Hadsereg" and "Vörös-tenger"

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