The medieval Scottish poem “Sir Patrick Spens”, which is written in Scots, contains the line:
The king sat in Dunfermline toun
drinking his blude reid wine,
which shows the original spelling and pronounciation of the word in Scots. And also the origin of the 14th most common Scottish surname.
Glass is another disguised color name - in some contexts, it comes from the Irish/Scottish Gaelic glas, meaning “grey” or “green”.
Why am I Mr. Pink? Why can’t we pick our own colors?
Googling Cerulean as a last name led me to the My Heritage web site, which had this to say:
“We found 44,710 records for Cerulean last name”
Also there is a list of notable Oranges here:
“William of”?
That may be derived from pinking, the method of creating a perforated pattern around a garment’s hem.
So…what did people call stuff that was the color we now call “purple” to distinguish it from, say, blue? I know purple dye was rare and expensive, but there were purple flowers, like foxglove, and it seems like it would’ve been important to know not to eat the plant with purple blossoms… How did they refer to pink or orange flowers?
Clearly, I have massive ignorance that needs to be fought.
They likely used blends like red-blue for purple, light red for pink, and red-yellow for orange. Words don’t enter the language until there is a need. How many times did people need to refer to those specific shades in England a thousand years ago?
Where the word was needed, it was coined. Purple comes from the Greek porphyra. That might refer to the shellfish that the famed purple dye was made of. Porphyry, from the Greek porphyrites or literally purple stone, was used for a mineral mined in Egypt.
Orange came in via the fruit. Citrine or saffron might have been used earlier. Pink as a color is very late, not common till the 18th century.
English has been growing in vocabulary for centuries. So the earlier you go, the smaller the choice of words. They managed.
Vida Blue?
Jan Crouch
Very interesting!
I wandered away and did some research on my own before I saw your post. I find it interesting that the Latin word (which was borrowed from the Greek, just as you said) from which the word purple was derived was purpura. I’d heard of purpura before in medical contexts and never made the connection. D’oh!
Before the word pink appeared, people said pale rose.Until 200 years after the arrival of the fruit, the term for orange was yellow-red.
I do think the English had plenty of reasons to refer to colors; they just had different names for them. Or maybe they didn’t see colors as we do. Apparently language can influence how we see colors. Mind-boggling.
Thanks so much for the info!
There are some people around named Purpura. Who wants to live their life with a disease name?
One such person who was in the news was Michael Purpura, a staff attorney in the Trump administration.
I know a Tan family who isn’t Chinese as well. They are white, so some kind of European, I’m guessing Western, probably mid-continent, but I don’t actually know.
Well, and there are also “Pinkertons,” and other names with “Pink” in them.
“Violet” is definitely a last name, and I’m pretty sure I saw “Foxglove” as a last name of an author, although it could have been a pen-name.
I was going to mention him! I have also personally known someone whose last name was Blue.
And, I know a family named “Rose.” They are Jewish, so it could have been something else, that got changed at Ellis Island, but if it didn’t sound like a reasonable last name, I doubt the people at Ellis Island would have chosen it.
“Rose” is the name of a noble Scottish family; however, it derives neither from the color nor the flower, but from the Norman placename Ros.
Slight nitpick- immigration officials at Ellis Island didn’t change any names, for the simple reason that they didn’t write any down - they merely checked immigrants’ names against the arriving ship’s manifest. Many immigrants, or their descendents, changed their names themselves; my grandfather did, when he shed his unwieldy (to Americans) Czech name and renamed himself after a baseball player. The idea that immigration officials at Ellis Island carelessly or casually altered immigrants’ names out of ignorance or to “Americanize” them is an urban myth; as a matter of fact, the U.S. government employed translators at Ellis Island, one of them future mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who spoke Italian, Yiddish, and English.
Another famous Blue:
Rose is a very common part of many Yiddish names (Rosenbaum, Rosenberg, etc). It refers to the flower. A lot of names were shortened to one syllable by Jewish immigrants or the clerks on Ellis Island.
Look just two posts up from yours.
In that case, I suspect that some people who either intended to fully assimilate and changed their minds, or tried, then didn’t succeed or weren’t happy, and went back, were nonetheless stuck with the names, making up stories to account for them. I knew several people who told stories of having their names changed for them at Ellis Island, and other people who told stories of this happening to their parents, in such a way, that it was clear they had heard the story about it originally from their parents.
I can see people doing such a thing in a just-arrived fervor, and regretting it later, maybe even feeling guilty.
The only other thing I can think of is employees jokingly mangling or shortening someone’s difficult (for Americans) name, and the new arrivals misunderstanding these as official assignments. But if LaGuardia tells a different story, I’m sticking with the first explanation. Some people got their names translated, though, and I tend to chalk that up to overly ambitious interpreters, who did not intend to assign a name, but that is what ended up happening. I’m suggesting this, because I am skeptical that new arrivals would know the English for their names.
I see that you are channeling Calvin and Hobbes:
Went through Navy boot camp with a guy with the last name Redd. Worked with an engineer with the last name Orange. Said his grandfather did not like the name Jones, it was too common. He changed it to Orange to have a fairly unique last name. Dated a gal with the last name Green. She had a fetish for the color purple, it was the only color of clothing she would wear. My last colorful story in about a former co-worker named Violet Ford. I found a purple Ford Mustang Hot Wheels car and gave it to her. Got a chance to visit her a few years ago on her 85th birthday. That same Hot Wheels car, still in the package, was in a very ornate shadow box hanging on her dining room wall. She said it puts a smile on her face every time she looks at it.
“Mr Brown? That’s a little too close to Mr Shit.”