EN
The paper presents a contrastive description of the basic colour term ‘yellow’ in Polish and German from the point of view of its prototypical reference, etymological data, symbolism, linguistic collocations, connotative features, linguistic and cultural reference and figurative use in both languages to discover cultural similarities and differences ‘hidden’ in the analysed expressions. The author discusses the linguistic conceptualisation and the sense of żółty /yellow in Polish in comparison to that of gelb/yellow in German and compares the classes of objects referred to by the given colour terms. Various types of objects (plants, animals, anatomic structure, body parts, illnesses, appearance, terms for people, foods, artifacts, idiomatic expressions) in each of the languages are studied.