In their early work in the 1960s, they gathered color-naming data from 20 languages. The most widely accepted explanation for the differences goes back to two linguists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. The goal of our project was to understand why cultures vary so much in their color word usage. So while English has 11 words that everyone knows, the Papua-New Guinean language Berinmo has only five, and the Bolivian Amazonian language Tsimane’ has only three words that everyone knows, corresponding to black, white and red. Nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures. Interestingly, the ways that languages categorize color vary widely. But this is still a tiny fraction of the colors that we can distinguish. Maybe if you’re an artist or an interior designer, you know specific meanings for as many as 50 or 100 different words for colors – like turquoise, amber, indigo or taupe. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. Check it out.People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. We’ve also introduced yet another meaning for the word Orange. If this article scratched an itch for you, you might like Sporcle’s color quizzes or language quizzes. But when it comes to etymology, the fruit comes first. Obviously the color orange has existed for an incredibly long time. From there, orange was pretty undeniable as one of the main basic colors. So when he outlined the colors of the light spectrum as shown through a prism, orange was one of them. It’s almost as if he was hesitant about using the word in that way.īy the late 1660s, when Isaac Newton began experimenting with light, “orange” had been well-established as a word. In the color usage though, he usually pairs it with “tawny”. William Shakespeare, in the mid 1590s, uses the word “orange” in both the context of the fruit and the color. But it didn’t become a common word for quite some time.
The first recorded use of “orange” as a color word occurred after sweet oranges became well-known, in 1512. But then they quickly became popular with the upper class, and they also perfectly exemplified that one color: betwixt yellow and red. Sweet oranges didn’t spread around Europe until the late 1400s. This led to words like ‘arancia’ in Italian and ‘arange’ in Old English, which eventually evolved into the word as we know it today. So articles like ‘an’ in English, or ‘un’ in French blur with the word, and the ‘n’ in naranga gets dropped. Languages with articles ending in the letter ‘n’ don’t create a clear distinction between the end of an article and the beginning of the next word. When naranga (an old name for bitter oranges) started to be imported into Europe, the name for them shifted. But none of these dominated, and in the 1390s, Chaucer still used “His colour was a light tawny, betwixt yellow and red,” to describe a fox. Tawny was an option as well, especially for brown-ish oranges. Citrine, a precious stone, was first used as a color word in 1386.Ĭrog, a yellow-ish orange similar to saffron, was a thing for a while. Saffron, another food inspired shade, was first recorded as a color word in 1200. A few other names were attempted for these colors, but none really stuck. But it wasn’t a particularly popular color descriptor. Prior to the naming of orange, orange things still had to sometimes be described in more detail than “red”. Obviously the wavelength range of 590–620 nm existed in visible light, but we weren’t calling it orange. Simple: when those phrases were coined, orange hadn’t become a color yet. Even Mars, which we call the red planet, is more of an orange color in the majority of photos.