In this article we introduce combinatorial multicolour discrepancies and generalize several classical results from $2$-colour discrepancy theory to $c$ colours ($c \geq 2$). We give a recursive method that constructs $c$-colourings from approximations of $2$-colour discrepancies. This method works for a large class of theorems, such as the ‘six standard deviations’ theorem of Spencer (1985), the Beck–Fiala (1981) theorem, the results of Matoušek, Wernisch and Welzl (1994) and Matoušek (1995) for bounded VC-dimension, and Matoušek and Spencer's (1996) upper bound for the arithmetic progressions. In particular, the $c$-colour discrepancy of an arbitrary hypergraph ($n$ vertices, $m$ hyperedges) is \[ \OO\Bigl(\sqrt{\tfrac n c\,\log m}\Bigr). \] If $m = \OO(n)$, then this bound improves to \[ \OO\Bigl(\sqrt{\tfrac n c\,\log c}\Bigr). \]

On the other hand there are examples showing that discrepancy in $c$ colours can not be bounded in terms of two-colour discrepancies in general, even if $c$ is a power of 2. For the linear discrepancy version of the Beck–Fiala theorem, the recursive approach also fails.

Here we extend the method of floating colours via tensor products of matrices to multicolourings, and prove multicolour versions of the Beck–Fiala theorem and the Bárány–Grinberg theorem. Using properties of the tensor product we derive a lower bound for the $c$-colour discrepancy of general hypergraphs. For the hypergraph of arithmetic progressions in $\{1, \ldots, n\}$ this yields a lower bound of $\frac{1}{25 \sqrt c} \sqrt[4]{n}$ for the discrepancy in $c$ colours. The recursive method shows an upper bound of $\OO(c^{-0.16} \sqrt[4]{n})$