![]() In a 1999 survey by linguists Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi, languages were roughly equally distributed between the basic color categories that they tracked. English, for example, has the full set of 11 basic colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, pink, gray, brown, orange and purple. Most languages have between two and 11 basic color words. “Black” comes from a word meaning “burnt,” and “white” comes from a word meaning “shining.”Ĭolor words vary a lot across the world. But even our words “black” and “white” didn’t originate as color terms. Some of the more exotic ones, like “vermilion” and “chartreuse,” were borrowed from French, and are named after the color of a particular item (a type of mercury and a liquor, respectively). It is striking that English color words come from many sources. ![]()
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