two-colorable
|two-col-or-a-ble|
/ˌtuːˈkʌl.ə.rə.bəl/
able to be colored with two colors (i.e., bipartite)
Etymology
'two-colorable' originates from modern English compounding: 'two' + 'color' + the adjectival suffix '-able' (from Old French/Latin), where 'two' denotes the number 2, 'color' denoted 'hue' or 'stain', and '-able' meant 'capable of being'.
'color' comes from Latin 'color' → Old French 'colour' → Middle English 'colour' → modern English 'color/colour'; 'two' comes from Old English 'twā' → modern 'two'; the suffix '-able' comes via Old French from Latin '-abilis', producing English adjectives like 'colorable' and thus the compound 'two-colorable'.
Initially the elements 'two', 'color', and the suffix '-able' had their independent basic meanings ('2', 'hue', 'capable of'); over time they were combined in technical/mathematical English to mean 'able to be colored with two colors', i.e., the current graph-theoretic sense.
Meanings by Part of Speech
Noun 1
the property of being two-colorable (i.e., the ability of a structure to be properly colored using two colors).
Two-colorability is an important property in graph theory.
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Adjective 1
capable of being colored with two colors so that adjacent/connected elements (e.g., vertices of a graph) receive different colors; equivalent to being bipartite.
The graph is two-colorable if and only if it contains no odd cycle.
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Last updated: 2025/11/25 09:21