Mix blue and white and you get…light blue, or maybe baby blue, or sky blue.
Mix green and white and you get pale green, or light green.
Mix red and white and you get pink.
Apparently “pink” is a universal enough term in English to be considered one of our basic color terms. There are single-word terms for some varieties of lighter colors – lime is a lighter shade of green, azure is a lighter blue. But none of those words are as universally understood (in English) as pink.
Why, in English, are pale versions of red given the name “pink,” while none of the other primary or secondary colors have a similarly common single-word name? “Light red” or “pale red” are unusual terms, at best, but “light blue” and “pale green” are common.
(Gray, I suppose, is the exception – black plus white doesn’t equal pale black.)
What makes pink so special among speakers of English?
Pink (the colour) is named after the flowers called ‘pinks’ (small carnation-like things), which are often that hue. They in turn are named ‘pinks’ because the edges of the petals are ‘pinked’ - or frilled.
Before this happened to our language, the colour pink would be described as ‘white flushed with rose’ or something like that.
So we do have lots of colours named in that way - aqua, turqouise, peach, tangerine, salmon, etc…
The ancient Greeks didn’t even have a word for blue, so they say. Stinks of urban legend to me, but the usual sources of rebuttal don’t seem to have much to say on that precise question. World Wide Words does have an interesting page on the etymology of names of colours, naturally.
Yes. I know that English (thanks to generations of catalog copywriters, if nothing else) has many, many, many words for different shades of colors–ecru, cerulean, Liz Taylor violet, etc.
But “pink” is such a fundamental word in the language that it’s considered one of our 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, purple, gray and…pink!
Salmon is not on that list. Nor is aqua, nor turquise, nor camel, nor lilac.
My question isn’t “where did we get the word pink” but “why does light red get a special, universal term whereas light blue and light green don’t.”
But Cecil’s answer does suggest that it’s not a phenomenon limited to English. In which case it’s a more universal question: why do languages include a term for light red before they include a term for light green or light yellow?
Partly because there’s a heck of a lot of it about.
Also, we perceive it as a distinct colour - pink, not light red. That perception is possibly largely cultural, but now it’s here, it’s taken over.
Pink is not light red - it’s pink (probably closer to light magenta)
I realise this boils down to pretty much ‘that’s just the way things are’, but sometimes, there isn’t going to be a satisfying answer - The language developed naturally and haphazardly - so some of it is just the luck of the draw, but if there was a general need for a common term for a particular shade of light blue, then I suspect we would have developed such a term.
I’d guess it was the big emotional difference between blood-angry-throbbing red and tame little pink. There’s not much emotional difference between a light and dark blue. Maybe navy starts to look military, but that’s because it’s getting close to black.
That’s what I thought until I started using computer paint programs. Then I learned that you start with white and subtract just a little yellow, magenta and cyan respectively.
My teacher told us that when I was little. “The primary colors are yellow, magenta, and cyan… however crayola disagrees and since we’re using they’re products they shall hereby be referred to as yellow red and blue.”
My teacher told us that when I was little. “The primary colors are yellow, magenta, and cyan… however crayola disagrees and since we’re using their products they shall hereby be referred to as yellow red and blue.”
Possibly because calling it “pink” is a lot easier and shorter than calling it “utterly nasty colour that is horribly inflicted upon young daughters and is unpleasant and hateful to the eye”?
And yes, as has been said, it does come from the name of the flower.
Trivia bit - just because I was once amazed to find this - the “pinking shears” used in dressmaking etc. are also named after the flower, apparently because of the jagged looking edges thereof. It may not impress anyone else, but it came as a surprise to me.
Speaking as a baker I know that when we go to color icings there are many, many shades of all the primary and secondary colors available.
And red is looked on as distinct from pink. It simply looks different from red that has been lightened with white. That’s also the way it’s sold. There are several types of red, but pink is on it’s own, and is not named as a variety of red.
