I saw a Cambridge grammar article discussing whether to use 'colour pencils' or 'coloured pencils'. This piqued my interest quite a bit. However, the article only talked about how camparatively popular these terms are, it never said which one is grammatically correct.
So below are two examples I thought of:
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What colour/coloured car is your favorite?
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Which colour/coloured apple would you like, red or green?
In both examples, I am tempted to use 'coloured', since it would be a participle turned adjective. What's interesting is that 'colour' actually seemed to be the more popular of the two whether it's proper usage or not.
So which one should I use in either example sentences? Could it be that native speakers prefer using 'colour' because it rolls off the tongue easier?
Thanks a bunch in advance.
Best Answer
I think "what colour X" is grammatically anomalous, but is certainly the preferred form (the NOW corpus has just one instance of "what colo(u)red NOUN" in that sense ("what coloured clothes they wear"), against around 280 of "what colo(u)r NOUN").
My hypothesis is that it arises from a combination "what colour is your X?" and loss of the dental before other consonants (as in "what colour(ed) car"). I also note that the form with "colo(u)red" does not have the support of a parallel form in the affirmative, because
is not something we would normally say, except in the unusual circumstance when the colour had been added, for example in a digital photo.