Pronounced: flah-NUHR, noun
Notes: This word looks familiar, but I don’t recognize it
Yesterday’s word
The word puce, as a noun, is “a dark red or brown purple color”. As an adjective, it means “of this color”
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1700s
Background / Comments
Like most people, I knew that this was a kind of color, but I didn’t actually know what color. My most vivid memory of this word is from Monsters, Inc where they use color-coded folders for certain departments (puce is one of the colors). What I didn’t know that our word is traced to an animal: it came from the French word puce (flea), which came from the Latin word pulex (flea).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 