These adjectives indicate a dark or brownish colouring of the skin. Both swarthy and dusky signify skin of a dark cast, but the two words differ radically in connotation. Swarthy may be used neutrally in description: a tall man with a swarthy complexion. But it has so often been used to describe fictional characters of a romantic and sometimes sinister aspect that these associations accompany the word more often than not; a swarthy Spaniard or Italian in a Gothic novel. Dusky has exotic rather than suspicious connotations, a quality of mystery rather than menace. It seems somewhat lyrical or literary when applied to skin, suggesting a darkness of colouring that seems to have been dusted on like powder, a shadowy quality like an aura or an overlay: a dusky Moor; the dusky skins of the island girls.

Tawny and tanned suggest a warm colouring that falls between the extremes of dark and fair. Tanned describes skin that has darkened through exposure to the sun: tanned and healthy after a summer at the beach. Tawny indicates a natural colouring that is yellowish, orangish or reddish brown. This word was once applied to persons having tawny -coloured skin, an American Indian being called a tawny . But now tawny is seldom used of human beings except to describe the colour of hair: a tawny -haired teenager.

Black , coloured and mulatto are racial designations, implying classification on the basis of skin colour. Black suggests the dark pigmentation of the African Negro, and it is often used to mean Negro in the way that white is used to mean Caucasian: the so-called black race. Black is often used as a noun meaning the dark-skinned indigenous people of a country: Captain Cook found the blacks hostile when he landed at Botany Bay. The word is decreasing in Australian usage, since it underlines so clearly a colour difference; Aborigine, or Aboriginal, is the term preferred by both whites and non-whites. (The Australian Aborigines are usually classified anthropologically as Australoid or Proto-Caucasoid, not as Negroid.)

Coloured means non-white and may designate members of any race other than the Caucasian: coloured people. In practice, coloured is usually reserved for persons who are wholly or partially Negro, but the term may embrace Indians and Orientals as well, or be applied to dark-skinned South Americans or brown-skinned island peoples. Coloured is used in South Africa in a special sense to refer to any person who has both white and non-white ancestors.

Mulatto indicates the yellowish-brown complexion associated with a person who has one white and one Negro parent. This term is an unpleasant carry-over from an earlier era. It puts offensive stress on the idea of miscegenation, for mulatto derives from a Spanish word meaning "of mixed breed" that goes back to the Latin word for mule.

Many books could be written about the associations attending the word black in English and its cognates in European literature, and the corollary associations with the colour black in folk myths and popular proverbs, idioms and similar expressions. In the literature of Western civilization, the long association of black with evil (black arts, black -hearted), disease (the Black Death), gloom and despair (a black future) in opposition to the associations of white with goodness, purity, chastity and cleanliness is a fact, however misleading. With the fast-changing relationship between Negroes and whites, the connotations attending black are likewise changing. Among American Negroes, black is often preferred to Negro as a description of their race, Negro being considered by some as a term used mainly by white people and having disparaging or insulting overtones. This view is not shared by most white people who use it. Coloured is still widely used in the United States to designate Negroes, but is felt by some white people to be indelicate or disparaging. Some Negroes do not seem to find coloured so objectionable, since it is generally used as a simple description.