It is striking that English color words come from many sources. Some of the more exotic ones, like “vermilion” and “chartreuse,” were borrowed from French, and are named after the color of ...

In the perception of color in words, my palette is differently set from either of those mentioned. With me the vowel a is black, e is white, i red, o yellow, and u brown.

People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color ...

The number of words a given language has for colors can vary widely, from only a few—the Bassa language, spoken in Liberia, has two terms, one for the warm end of the color spectrum and one for ...