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See also Dutchzaluw, dialectal German sal; also Irish salach(“dirty”), Welsh halog, Latin salīva, Russian соло́вый(solóvyj, “cream-colored”), and - through Frankish - French sale.
Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine Hath wash’d thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!
1770, Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality, volume 5, Dublin, page 162:
[…] were it not that his Complexion is sallow, and that he is something short of a Leg, and Blind of one Eye, he would positively be the most lovely of all the human Species.
Then his sallow face brightened, for the hall had been carefully furnished, and was very clean. ¶ There was a neat hat-and-umbrella stand, and the stranger's weary feet fell soft on a good, serviceable dark-red drugget, which matched in colour the flock-paper on the walls.
She had sallow skin and myopic eyes, and none of the men had ever slept with her because none of the men had ever wanted to […]
2023 September 9, Jason Farago, “The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York”, in The New York Times:
For more than a century after the scandal of 1865, artists and historians wrestled with Olympia’s sallow skin, the bracelet on her right forearm, the orchid in her upswept red hair.
(Ireland) Of a tan colour, associated with people from southern Europe or East Asia.
2007 December 23, David McWilliams, We must begin the culture debate:
The girls are mostly Slavic-pretty, long-limbed with high cheekbones, sallow skin and green eyes. They are the closest thing to supermodels that Mulhuddart has ever seen.
Scenes like this — the sallow evening light, the old Indian cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets — were more native to him than England.
1972, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries. Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation, Predatory Mammals and Endangered Species, page 559:
Mr. President, the sallow air of our cities, the blackened sands of our seashores, our lakes and harbors reeking of sewage and depleted of oxygen are but a part of the sad legacy of the idea that nature can be treated as a servant, blindly obedient to every want, whim or pleasure of man.
2011, Jacob Murphy, Guardians, page 44:
The boat's deck was covered in moss, and its warm, sallow water was filled with lichens that gave off an eerie green glow.
2012, Dr. James Kennedy, The Baywood Tales, page 17:
My mouth went dry and a sallow feeling descended upon me.
2013, Dr. John H. LaManque, A Bricklayer's Story, page 130:
The burden of a hollow and sallow feeling that was suffocating my soul as a learner had given way at this time to a joyous feeling of anticipation;
2016, Paul Quintanilla, Master Tom:
This ugliness, though, filled the air now. With something rank and squalid and seemingly spent with the character of death. No, it wasn't that I was scared, being all alone now out on my property. In my house. It was this surrounding sallow atmosphere now which depressed me. This deep sense of some deep basic wrong occupying my surrounding world.
1912, Flora Annie Steel, King-Errant, New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Book 2, Chapter 6, p. 212:
The tan of his sunburnt face and hands contrasted sadly with the sallowing skin of the girl-wife, who, despite his care, was sinking under her task of son-bearing.
1918, Lola Ridge, “The Garden”, in The Ghetto and Other Poems, New York: Huebsch, page 93:
I might have stemmed them in a narrow vase And watched each petal sallowing . . .
His complexion had darkened, sallowed; his black moustache had lost boldness, become sardonic; there were lines which she did not know about his face.
1977, Robert Lowell, “Death of a Critic”, in Day by Day, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 48:
My maiden reviews, once the verbal equivalent of murder, are now a brief, compact pile, almost as old as I. They fall apart sallowing, their stiff pages chip like dry leaves flying the tree that fed them.
(transitive) To cause (someone or something) to become sallow.
1835, Fanny Kemble (as Frances Anne Butler), Journal, London: John Murray, Volume 1, entry for 15 September, 1832, p. 105, footnote,
The climate of this country is the scape-goat upon which all ill looks and ill health of the ladies is laid; but while they are brought up as effeminately as they are, take as little exercise, live in rooms like ovens during the winter, and marry as early as they do, it will appear evident that many causes combine with an extremely variable climate, to sallow their complexions, and destroy their constitutions.
1889, George Washington Cable, “How I Got them”, in Strange True Stories of Louisiana, New York: Scribner, page 10:
But would a pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time[…]?
1918, Edna Ferber, chapter 9, in Cheerful — By Request, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, page 252:
Mary Gowd, with her frumpy English hat and her dreadful English fringe, and her brick-red English cheeks, which not even the enervating Italian sun, the years of bad Italian food or the damp and dim little Roman room had been able to sallow.
All she knew was that she had been stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman added grace and suppleness, that her skin had been dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added luster to the radiant beauty of the other […]
[…] it came into my Mind, That the Twigs of that Tree from whence I cut my Stakes that grew, might possibly be as tough as the Sallows, and Willows, and Osiers in England[…]
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; [...]
1914, D. H. Lawrence, “The Shades of Spring”, in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, London: Duckworth, page 158:
Now, everything irritated him: the two sallows, one all gold and perfume and murmur, one silver-green and bristly, reminded him, that here he had taught her about pollination.
Who-so that buildeth his hous al of salwes, And priketh his blinde hors over the falwes, And suffreth his wyf to go seken halwes, Is worthy to been hanged on the galwes!
1564, William Bullein, A Dialogue Bothe Pleasaunte and Pietifull Wherein Is a Goodly Regimente against the Feuer Pestilence with a Consolacion and Comfort against Death, London: John Kingston, ,
set Sallowes about the bedde, besprinkled with vineger and rose water.
1767, Francis Fawkes (translator), The Idylliums of Theocritus, London, for the author, Idyllium 16, p. 156,
For lo! their spears the Syracusians wield,
And bend the pliant sallow to a shield:
1822, Maria Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons, volume I, Cambridge, page 111:
He stuck a number of sallows in a circle, at equal distances, in the grass; the circle was the size which he wished the basket to be. He then began to weave other sallows between these, in a manner which Frank easily learned to imitate […]
1867, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Adirondacs”, in May-Day, and Other Pieces, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, page 49:
The sallow knows the basketmaker’s thumb; The oar, the guide’s.
