Bagalamukhi is yellow throughout, and the colour is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Her worship uses yellow cloth, yellow flowers, turmeric and offerings of yellow food, and the practitioner is directed to sit in yellow garments. The standard image shows her seated on a golden throne in a hall of jewels, a club raised in her right hand, while with her left she draws out the tongue of a dark figure she is about to strike.
Her power is stambhana, arrest or immobilisation, and the texts specify it narrowly: stopping speech, stopping movement, stopping the capacity of an opponent to act. That makes her the Mahavidya most closely tied to results rather than to contemplative realisation, and her rites are accordingly among the most frequently commissioned in modern practice. She is invoked in litigation, in contests, against slander, and against adversaries in general.
The name is read in more than one way. One derivation takes bagala from valga, a bridle or bit, on the ground that a bridle is exactly a device for arresting motion, the change from v to b being a regular one. Another reads baka, the crane, which would make the epithet Bagalamukhi a literal description of a crane-faced goddess. The texts and the commentators do not settle between them, and both readings remain current within the tradition rather than one having displaced the other.