This study investigates how the Korean color term ‘Noran(yellow)’ constructs and transforms social meaning through metonymic and metaphoric structures in newspaper discourse. Color terms function not merely as perceptual descriptors but as semiotic resources that organize emotions, values, and social events. Among them, ‘Noran’ serves as a representative color word that symbolically mediates the emotional and historical consciousness of contemporary Korean society. Drawing on the framework of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory in Cognitive Linguistics, this study empirically examines the semantic expansion of ‘Noran’ in real discourse contexts. The data were collected from the BIGKinds database of the Korea Press Foundation, encompassing 2,044 news articles from four major newspapers―Kyunghyang Shinmun, Hankyoreh, Dong-A Ilbo, and Korea Economic Daily―published between the 1990s and 2024, all containing ‘Noran’ in their headlines. The analysis focused on the collocational nouns that ‘Noran’ modifies, identifying metaphorical and metonymic patterns based on contextual interpretation. The results show that ‘Noran’ was categorized into six discourse functions: policy, sorrow, warning, hope, risk, and others. Diachronic analysis revealed that in the 1990s, ‘Noran’ primarily served descriptive functions; in the 2000s, it expanded to express collective emotions such as mourning and hope (e.g., yellow ribbon, yellow umbrella); in the 2010s, following the Sewol Ferry disaster, ‘Noran’ became institutionalized as a symbol of national tragedy and collective memory. Since the 2020s, ‘Noran’ has been prominently used in political discourse through the expression the Yellow Envelope Act, reflecting an increase in the policy frame. Newspaper-specific analysis further indicated that progressive newspapers (Kyunghyang Shinmun, Hankyoreh) emphasized frames of sorrow and hope, constructing emotional solidarity and social empathy, whereas the economic newspaper (Korea Economic Daily) focused on policy and warning frames, and the conservative newspaper (Dong-A Ilbo) tended to retain descriptive and institutional usages. These findings demonstrate that ‘Noran’ functions as a discursive symbol mediating between social events and emotions, rather than a mere color descriptor. The meaning of ‘Noran’ extends through the cognitive pathway of “object → event → emotion/value,” where metaphor and metonymy interactively operate within socio-discursive contexts. This study contributes to expanding color term research beyond lexical semantics by modeling Noran’s dynamic meaning construction through a socio-linguistic and discourse-cognitive perspective. Future research may extend this approach to other media domains such as broadcasting and online platforms to explore the ongoing semiotic and social transformation of color meanings in Korean discourse.