" whitish "

[Adjective]  | "white" | \ ˈ(h)wīt \

1: having the color of new snow or milk; specifically : of the color white

2: light or pale in color

3: free from color : clear, transparent

Origin: before 12th century ;

 Middle English whit, white, going back to Old English hwīt "white, bright, shining," going back to Germanic *hwīta- (whence also Old Frisian hwīt, hwītt, wīt, wit "white," Old Saxon hwīt "white, bright," Middle Dutch wit, witt "white," Middle Low German wit, witte, Old High German hwīz, wīz, Old Icelandic hvítr, Gothic ƕeits), probably going back to Indo-European *ḱu̯ei̯t-nó-, whence also, with zero-grade, Sanskrit śvítnaḥ "whitish," and without suffixal -n- Sanskrit áśvait "(it) brightened," śvitāná- "brightening," śvetáḥ "white, bright," Avestan spaēta-, Old Church Slavic světŭ "light, radiance," svěštǫ, světiti "to shine, give light," Lithuanian šviečiù, šviẽsti "to shine, shine a light (for)"; (sense 2c) from the stereotypical and racist association of good character with northern European descent; (sense 6) from the association of white with royalist and counterrevolutionary causes, perhaps originally from its use in the cockades and flags of the Bourbon dynasty in France and the Jacobites in Britain;

  * Note : Though this etymology for Germanic *hwīta- see:ms likely in broad outline, the details are problematic. The *-t- in the Indo-European etymon would lead one to expect a voiced or voiceless fricative in Germanic rather than a voiceless stop. The explanation for this lies in the assumption that the cluster *-tn- after the accent in the presumed pre-form *ḱu̯ei̯t-nó- produced a geminate (Kluge's Law), which the individual Germanic languages have generally shortened after a long vowel (though this is arguably not the case for Old High German). The occasional tt spellings in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch and Middle Low German may be taken as traces of gemination. (E. Seebold, however, believes these forms are late and secondary, and points to the nominative neuter form hwitt in the Cotton Caligula manuscript of the Heliand—see: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache.) Their descendants in the modern languages in part also show a short vowel, giving rise to yet another assumption, that these forms go back to a zero-grade adjective *ḱu̯it-nó-. The older literature on *hwīta- simply accepts that its Indo-European predecessor was *ḱu̯ei̯d-, with -d- being a different root extension than the -t- evident in the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic words. See discussion and references in R. Lühr, Expressivität und Lautgesetz im Germanischen (Heidelberg, 1988), pp. 263-64; and in G. Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Brill, 2013), p. 267.;

[Adjective]  | "whitish" 

[Adjective]  | "white"