The color muddy yellow appears in literature as a versatile, often unsettling hue that evokes decay, pollution, and a general sense of bleakness. Authors use it to describe not only natural phenomena—such as the transformation of the sky at dawn [1], the tainted waters of rivers and seas [2], [3], [4], and the suffocating gas enveloping a city [5], [6]—but also human attributes and environments. Characters are portrayed with muddy yellow complexions that underscore unattractiveness or moral ambiguity [7], [8], [9] while landscapes, ranging from low adobe-walled rooms [10] to dusty, interminable roads [11], inherit its muted, lifeless tone. Even within biological descriptions, as in the coloration of fish [12] or the spectrum of varieties in a species [13], muddy yellow serves as a marker of everything from the mundane to the menacing. Collectively, these examples [1, 7, 2, 14, 8, 13, 9, 5, 10, 3, 11, 12, 15, 6, 4] demonstrate how the hue is employed to reinforce an atmosphere of decay, intensity, and complex character interplay.
- When rising it changes to a muddy yellow.
— from The Americans as They Are
Described in a tour through the valley of the Mississippi by Charles Sealsfield
- Then, plunging her two hands into a mass of corn, she removed a handful of it dripping with muddy yellowish water.
— from The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela
- In summer it was a sheet of muddy yellow water abounding in fish, and many acres in extent.
— from A Countess from Canada: A Story of Life in the Backwoods by Bessie Marchant
- The river water, by the way, is a muddy yellow now and leaves a deep deposit of Afric's golden sand in your glass or basin.
— from Ladysmith: The Diary of a Siege by Henry Woodd Nevinson
- Again he watched a city of twenty millions inundated by a muddy yellow gas in which no human being, no animal, might live.
— from When the Sleepers Woke by Arthur Leo Zagat
- A succession of trains on one hand, and a muddy yellow sea on the other: as a view it is not romantic.
— from South America To-day
A Study of Conditions, Social, Political and Commercial in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil by Georges Clemenceau
- His complexion was of a muddy yellow, disagreeable to see, but his features rendered him interesting if not sympathetic.
— from Sant' Ilario by F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
- He was spare in form, and his face was of a muddy yellow with the stamp of sensuality and cruelty in it.
— from Long Odds by Harold Bindloss
- His color was a muddy yellow, his features were sharp instead of flat, and his hair hung across his forehead almost straight.
— from The Four-Pools Mystery by Jean Webster
- They entered a long, low room, with adobe walls a muddy yellowish color.
— from The Forbidden Trail by Honoré Morrow
- The muddy yellow road wound endlessly past empty, barren fields, and seemed to hold out no promise of ever arriving anywhere in particular.
— from The Camp Fire Girls on the Open Road; Or, Glorify Work by Hildegard G. Frey
- The poorly fed fish will have few or no spots, a drab belly, and muddy yellow sides.
— from The Determined Angler and the Brook Trout
an anthological volume of trout fishing, trout histories, trout lore, trout resorts, and trout tackle by Charles Barker Bradford
- He is to be seen in all the varieties of the species, from a muddy yellow to the fierce-looking mastiff.
— from Peculiarities of American Cities by Willard W. Glazier
- Every July the sky was clouded by a muddy yellow smoke; the leaden sun, all its brightness gone, looked down on the earth like a bad eye.
— from In the World by Maksim Gorky
- [7] On the south of the tracks here dealt with the Amazon slowly sweeps its muddy yellow waters, 500,000 cubic feet per second, towards the ocean.
— from The North-West Amazons: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes by Thomas Whiffen