Pure color words

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There are hundreds of color words in English and most of them were named for something that typically has that color. Examples: orange, violet, pink, copper, salmon, turquoise, olive, chocolate. There are many, many more. This thread is not about them, but rather the minority of color words that are NOT named for something. Or at least if they were, it was in a different language or so far into the past that, today, the color word just stands for the color and not also for the thing the name came from.

So I did some thinking and came up with a starter list. I’m looking for additions, of course.

I also came up with a couple restrictions. First, it has to be a single word and not a compound, such as blue-green, bloodred, or kelly green. Second, it has to be a general use color word, not one with restricted use. So hazel and blond(e) are out as are most, if not all, the heraldic tinctures (more on this anon).

Here’s the list:

  • black
  • blue
  • brown
  • crimson
  • cyan
  • gray/grey
  • green
  • maroon
  • purple
  • red
  • scarlet
  • white
  • yellow

Now purple is an edge case. It derives from purpura but has moved on from that origin. I decided to include it, but I can see the argument against that.

An edge case that I didn’t include is azure. It’s a heraldic tincture, but has moved beyond that narrow niche. However, I’m not sure it’s ever used to describe anything except the sky or the sea. Which would still leave it as a non-general use color word. But perhaps I’m wrong.

So any additions?

2

Doesn’t maroon come from a word meaning “chestnut” (as in the nut, not the colour)?

EDIT: Sorry, I missed the part of the original post that excludes non-English meanings.

3

pink
beige
khaki
magenta

4

I would discount scarlet, as it had the meaning “kind of cloth” in English.

I’d add dun and taupe.

@GreenWyvern pink’s definitely out by the OP’s criteria, it’s named after the flower (which is itself named after the fabric decoration technique)

Magenta’s an interesting case, though. Although it’s now popular as a colour name and enshrined in CMYK, it’s such a relatively modern name, and started as a trade name.

5

“Khaki” originally referred to a type of cloth, and military uniforms made from that cloth.

6

I’m not clear how the OP’s standard on languages applies. Does mauve count? It’s the French word for the mallow flower, which is what the color was named after.

7

Oh I thought this thread was going to be about the universality of basic color terms across languages, one of my favorite language invariants. If you know how many basic color terms a language has, the theory tells you what colors they are. English has eleven basic color terms ( black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray), in the sense that most speakers view other colors as variants or shades of one of these. These don’t exactly match up with the OP’s list of “colors not named for something else”.

Regarding the OP’s list, “maroon” meant “chestnut” in English before it was a color word, so that seems disqualified (OED’s first cite as “chestnut” is 1594, first use as a color is 1779). Likewise “scarlet” meant a kind of cloth, of various colors, before it became a color word specifically meaning “red”.

8

It’s worth noting that there has been significant criticism of Berlin and Kay’s theory since it was published in 1969.

See the wiki starting here - Relativist view, and Recent scholarship.

 
Digressing further …

The partitioning and naming of color space also varies across different languages. It is not true that there are equivalent words for every region of color space in every language.

Many languages have a word for blue/green (such as Japanese - Japanese traffic lights are red, yellow, and ‘blue’).

In Gaelic both the sky and the grass can be described as ‘gorm’ - a bright blue-green range, whereas ‘glas’ means a duller grey-green range. But there are two different words, ‘dearg’ and ‘ruadh’, for what English speakers would consider simply ‘red’, depending on luminosity.

Russian, Italian, and Greek have different basic words for darker and lighter shades of blue. They are considered by the speakers of these languages to be completely different colors, but English speakers consider them to be different shades of the same color.

Navajo has one word for both grey and brown, but two words for different kinds of black.

Etc, etc.

Here’s a very comprehensive paper about why color terms vary in different languages:

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10785

The debate on the origins of color categories pits the hypothesis that color-naming systems emerge from universal underlying principles determined innately against the view that culture determines color categories; it is often implied that only one or the other of these theories is correct. Our results favor a reconciliation of these ideas through the the efficient-communication hypothesis, which states that categories reflect a tradeoff between informativeness of the terms and their number.

Cultures across the globe show common patterns in color naming, and even languages with few high consensus color terms appear to have a complete color lexicon distributed across the population, as shown by Lindsey et al. (3) for the Hadza of Africa and by us in the Tsimane’ of South America.These common patterns across cultures suggest some universal constraint on color naming, but the variability in communicative efficiency about color terms across cultures suggests that culture plays a role too.

According to the communication-efficiency hypothesis, if a culture has little need for many high-consensus color categories, it is simpler in that communication system not to have them.

We show that all cultures around the world favor communication about warm colors over cool colors, and that this phenomenon reflects a universal feature of natural scenes: Objects defined by human observers tend to be warm colored while backgrounds tend to be cool colored. These results provide evidence that usefulness is the reason for the addition of color terms.

9

Cloth made of undyed wool. I originally had this on my list until I checked the dictionary.

Yes, but the cloth was not necessarily colored scarlet.

Dun seems to have originally been a horse of that color. Although that was a very long time ago and I don’t know if horse people still use the term with that meaning. I think they do.

Taupe … we have a winner! Or at least it looks like it based on my dictionary.

M-W says it’s from the name of an Italian town. I read somewhere that it was because of an especially bloody battle there. I don’t remember where I read that, and it could easily be wrong. Considering that another meaning of the word is a synonym of a particular dye, it’s likely it is wrong.

If the color was named from some object in another language and then English only borrowed the color word and not the object name, then it’s good. Mauve looks like it’s good.

Based on my M-W Collegiate, I thought this was what happened with maroon. But as @markn_1 says, English borrowed the word for chestnut first. However, that seems to fall into the “so far into the past” exception, since “chestnut” is not the meaning of maroon anymore.

So it looks like we’ve added taupe, mauve, and maybe magenta.

10

How about vermilion?

11

Vermillion was a name for cinnabar in English before it was a color term, and the OED has citations for its use as the name for the mineral as recently as 1871.

12

Origin is French, it means mole, derived from Old French, and this from Latin talpa. Just looked it up in Merriam Websters to confirm it.

13

But taupe does not mean “mole” in English.

14

It is still the origin of the word. I am not sure the distinction between an English word and the origin of an English word is neat. But OK, it’s your thread, your rules; I just pointed to where the word came from, even if it is not common knowledge anymore.

15

So far as I know, “octarine” has never referred to anything other than the color, in any language.

16

Then that leads directly to this list…

17

I’m not looking for words with no origin. It’s be an awful short list if I were.

18

I think puce also qualifies. It’s from the French word for a flea. The name of the color derives from what the stain looks like when you squished a flea in a bedsheet. Which is probably the most disgusting etymology for a color name I’ve encountered.

19

From Wiki :

It has long been claimed that scarlet cloth was produced in red, white, blue, green, and brown colors, among others, with carmine red being merely the most common colour. However, recent work has argued that this is a misunderstanding of the use of colour-terms in medieval cloth production, and that references to other colours in scarlet production refers to their colour before dyeing with kermes.

No, the colour term is older than calling just horses that (for instance, the Norse cognate refers to female ducks).

It’s more that the horse colour name retains the meaning whereas we mostly use other words for dun-coloured things nowadays.

Yes, but in English, it’s always been a colour word, not a word for actual moles.