I want to learn the names of all the colors. It is fascinating to me how simply learning the names of things improves perception and recall. Any advice for improving my color vocabulary?
What do you mean by “all the colors?” Here is a list of the colors used in standard HTML coding, but beyond the dozen or so colors that are recognized as standard (red, green, blue, yellow, etc.) there is no universal standard for color names.
Walk into a paint store some day and look at the thousands of paint chips they have on display and try to memorize all of those names. Then go to a different paint store, and they will have a completely different set of names.
I thought maybe either Crayola or possibly Pantone. I might buy the Crayola art program. http://www.amazon.com/Core-Learning-CRCS-1500-Crayola-Creative/dp/B0041RZR1A/ref=sr_1_3?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1287330688&sr=1-3
FatBaldguy - that you link you gave is excellent thank you.
And of course you can’t learn them all because there is literally an infinity of colors. For any two colors you can think of, I can always find a new color in between.
Between “Blue” and “Light Blue”, there is some middle color called “Sortof Light But sortof dark blue”. So there’s a new color for you to learn. But between that one and “Light Blue”, there’s another color called “Even lighter than sortof light bug sortof dark blue”. And there’s a slightly lighter shade of blue than that, and a slightly lighter shade of that too, etc for infinity.
You cannot memorize all the colors anymore than you can memorize all the numbers.
But they don’t all have names.
Learning “all the colors” may be a nonsense proposition, but learning all the names of all the named colors isn’t (meaning, names that people actually use and don’t make up for the sake of the exercise). I mean, it’s maybe still impossible in a lifetime–but it’s not an absurd theoretical objective.
There’s no need to dick around with “even lighter than sortof light blue,” but it is entirely commendable to aspire to know azure, cerulean, cornflower, sapphire and ultramarine.
I especially like the part listing which colors were disproportionately popular among men Vs. women.
all 16.7 billion of them
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Nope, Planck length would limit your measure of the wave length
Since colors don’t get offended easily, you can probably get away with calling them “sport” and “champ” and tricking them into introducing themselves to each other and so on.
If you have a working theory of quantum gravity you’d like to share with the class, we’re all ears.
I’m surprised the men’s list isn’t more taupe heavy.
flees
That’s because taupe is not a color. Peach and pumpkin are also not colors.
Using the hex codes used in HTML:
#000000 Black
#000001 Black as a coal mine at midnight
#000002 Pretty darn black
#000003 Getting gray. No, never mind, still black.
#000004 Lack-of-light black
#000005 Voidness-of-starless-space black
#000006 No appreciable reflection of visible light
#000007 Still detectable as black for most people
Those are from memory, I’ll look up the complete list when I get a chance. 
How many colors are in Webster’s?
Where they actually hold the definition as a color.
Peach would count as per definition#2
1: a : a low spreading freely branching Chinese tree (Prunus persica) of the rose family that has lanceolate leaves and sessile usually pink flowers and is widely cultivated in temperate areas for its edible fruit which is a single-seeded drupe with a hard central stone, a pulpy white or yellow flesh, and a thin fuzzy skin b : the edible fruit of the peach
2: a moderate yellowish pink
3: one resembling a peach (as in sweetness, beauty, or excellence)
Something like cranberry would not count as per definition:
1: the red acid berry produced by some plants (as Vaccinium oxycoccos and V. macrocarpon) of the heath family; also : a plant producing these
2: any of various plants with a fruit that resembles a cranberry
“Color” is meaningless except in the context of cognition. There is an infinite number of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum, which is not the same thing as an infinite number of colors.
OTOH any number that can be named can be perceived and understood as a distinct number.
I can tell you the names of at least four.
Those are just the blue ones. #010000 or #000100 is (roughly) as dark as #000001, so you need some way to distinguish them. Maybe, “If I could see anything other than black here, I guess it would be blue” would do?
Males and females see different numbers of colors.
Is black a color? Or merely the absence of light?