What colour a black eye is in each country

In English a black eye is black, but in most of Europe it’s blue. In Spain, Portugal and Turkey it’s purple, and in France it’s an eye in black butter. This map shows what colour a black eye is in each country.

Mostly blue

Germans, Austrians, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes all get a blue eye. Russians and Ukrainians get a blue under the eye, because their word for a bruise comes from the word for blue. Romanians and Moldovans get a dark blue eye, Bulgarians get a blued eye and Lithuanians get a blueness.

Black, purple and something else entirely

The English, Irish, Finns and Greeks stick with black. The Spanish, Portuguese and Turks go for purple.

Why the French get black butter

The French say œil au beurre noir, an eye in black butter. It started as a pun, first recorded in 1585 as an eye poached in black butter, because œil, eye, sounds a lot like œuf, egg. Picture an egg fried in butter that’s gone dark brown. The eye is the yolk and the bruise is the white.

Then there are the ones that aren’t colours at all. Icelanders get an embers eye, Poles get a horseshoe, and Czechs and Hungarians get a monocle, which at least sounds distinguished. China and Japan aren’t on the map, but they both call it panda eyes.

What the grey means

Grey means I couldn’t find a phrase I trusted, not that nobody there gets punched. Most languages have several words for a black eye, so I’ve picked the usual one, or in Poland’s case the most interesting one. Poles mostly say podbite oko, a punched eye.

If you like this sort of thing, see what each country says instead of when pigs fly or which foreigners each country named the cockroach after.

Sources: Wiktionary and the Wiktionary entry in each language, Expressio, La langue française, Langenscheidt.

See every country

Country	What they say	Literally
UK and Ireland	black eye	Black eye
Finland	musta silmä	Black eye
Greece	μαύρο μάτι	Black eye
Germany and Austria	blaues Auge	Blue eye
Netherlands	blauw oog	Blue eye
Sweden	blått öga	Blue eye
Norway	blått øye	Blue eye
Denmark	blåt øje	Blue eye
Latvia	zila acs	Blue eye
Lithuania	mėlynė	Blueness
Bulgaria	насинено око	Blued eye
Romania and Moldova	ochi vânăt	Dark blue eye
Russia	синяк под глазом	A blue under the eye
Ukraine	синець під оком	A blue under the eye
Belarus	сіняк	A blue (under the eye)
Spain	ojo morado	Purple eye
Portugal	olho roxo	Purple eye
Turkey	morarmış göz	Purple eye
France	œil au beurre noir	Black butter eye
Iceland	glóðarauga	Embers eye
Czechia	monokl	Monocle
Hungary	monokli	Monocle
Poland	podkowa	Horseshoe