#colour words

[rjavenuru]

for a project...

Turquoise is...

...a type of green.

...a type of blue.

Neither.

Both.

Voting ended onAug 13, 2025

feel free to comment if you have clarifications and please reblog...

[lingthusiasm]

Gretchen: It's unlikely that you'd get a language that only has three colour terms and those terms are turquoise, orange, and pink. Lauren: Yeah, because that’s not covering a lot. I mean, it might be covering a lot of the colour space in your wardrobe but not for all speakers. Gretchen: Admittedly there is a lot of turquoise  in my wardrobe. Lauren: So it’s not surprising that late stage colours like pink and orange have really clear and recent etymologies in English compared to something like red or green or white. I remember when I learned this stuff in undergrad a friend of mine in the class just would not believe that you could cover brown, purple, and grey in one colour. She was just like "how could you have one word that covers all of those three??" And then one day she came to class and she was so excited and was like, "look, look at the scarf that I bought!" And it was true, you couldn’t tell, in certain contexts it looked brown and some contexts it looked purple and in some contexts it looked grey and that was her, like, theoretical proof those colours were close enough that it made sense to put them in one word. Gretchen: Well the scarf actually brings us into an interesting point about why languages developed colour terms, which is that there’s often some relationship between produced goods whether that’s dyed fabrics or gemstones or other types of processed goods that people make into specific colours. Because if you’re thinking about the sky for example, you know, we say all the time the sky is blue, but it’s really not necessary to specify that the sky is blue. You can say the sky is dark or light, the sky is cloudy or clear, and if it’s clear and it's light of course it’s blue! What other colour is it going to be? Or you can say something like the tree is living or the tree is dying, you don’t necessarily need to specify the tree is green or that it’s red. In nature a lot of things only really come in one specific colour. Whereas once you start making cars you don’t say this car is ripe or it’s not ripe, or this car is cloudy or it’s clear, or this dress that you’re going to make is ripe or unripe or that this basket that you’re weaving is dyed a particular colour. Once you start dying stuff in colours it becomes more useful to talk about a finer variations or if you send someone to buy for you a particular thing in particular colour may want to specify exactly what that colours going be once you start colouring stuff artificially. Lauren: So certain technological innovations can give rise to the necessity for finer distinctions and colour terms. Gretchen: And some colour terms are etymologically linked to specific things that created those colours. Purple, for example, is linked to the name of the particular mollusc that was used to make purple dye back around ancient Greece. Gretchen: I came across a study of women in Eastern Europe where specifically the older women had more colour terms related to traditional dyeing methodology for textiles, whereas the younger women had become disconnected from traditional dyeing terminology for textiles and could no longer identify words like madder and russet and stuff like this that are used in traditional terms – they tended to use more industrialised colour terms. This seems to be one of those “if you use it you get more words for it” areas, like with any specialised domain. Lauren: Yeah, there’s a professional vocabulary distinction to be made there as well. I do remember reading something, and again we’re into uncited anec-data here, but I do remember reading something that said professionals can discriminate with more technical words, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they see more colours than people who don’t have these professional words. So you might give people two similar colour chips. And someone who does fabric work will say "that’s magenta and that’s russet," whereas someone who doesn’t have to discriminate will be like, "Well, this one’s rustier and this one’s richer red." They can still see the difference. It’s not like not having the word prevents you. Or, people who I’m friends with in Nepal who predominantly speak a language that doesn’t have a blue-green distinction, they still see the distinction, they still prefer fabric in one colour over another one. Gretchen: Yeah, if you're painting your bedroom yellow, you're not going to be like, "I dunno, all yellows look the same to me" -- you probably care whether it's like a lemon yellow or a butter yellow or a golden yellow. But if you're sorting laundry, you might go back to the most fundamental colour distinctions and just separate out the lights and the darks.

Excerpt from Episode 5 of Lingthusiasm: Colour words around the world and inside your brain. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for links to further reading.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[cathartic-writing-things]

colour words! (2/2)

found here. intended for writers, this is especially helpful when i write cathartic colours. big thanks to ingrid sundberg’s colour thesaurus!!

[therealdanacardinal]

Hey does anyone know any colour related names? Things that either are, mean, or make you think of colours? I'd love to hear from you thanks

[msbarrows]

Today’s minor pet peeve; writers who go overboard on the “I will use any word other than blue, green, brown, grey, etc. to describe eye colour, and I will identify their eye colour every single time their eyes are referenced” thing. Especially when they use contradictory colour terms. Emerald and peridot? Not even close to the same shade. Peridot and apple green maybe. But even so, just the occasional use is fine. You can identify the eyes as being “emerald green” or “a pale peridot green” or whatever when they’re first described so we get a good mental image of what exact shade of ____ you mean, and maybe as an occasional reminder here and there, but if you refer to their eyes every. single. time. as honey-coloured or whiskey-coloured or whatever? It gets old. Fast. In fact once we’re aware of their eye colours we don’t actually need to be reminded every time you mention their eyes that their eyes are a specific colour or colour range. We know character X has colour Y; you already told us that. Probably several times.

(Of course I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past, we probably all go through that purple prose phase where everything needs to be described in exhaustive and meticulous detail).

(Okay additional even more minor peeve - things like honey comes in a variety of shades, from pale near-white gold to dark near-black brown and sometimes verging on orange or even red. You’re still not really identifying what the hell shade you mean when you use such a generic term, so why are you even bothering with the flowery words?)

[postcardsandpieces-blog]

Brain Training Colour Words (Stroop Effect)