Colour Names - Background and Connotations

The semantic character of colour terminology is presented here.
It suggests that while colour may be seen the same all over the world by the human eye, it is categorised and described in different ways depending on culture and environment.

Here we look at the connotations of words used by manufacturers to persuade customers to associate colour with atmosphere, history, liveliness etc. These are colour names as advertising ploys.

Background to Colour

Pigment

Modern colours of pigment are almost infinite in their range. The primary colours (red, yellow, blue) are combined with black and white to create secondary (orange, green, brown) and tertiary colours which can in turn be lightened or darkened to create a wide range of colours.
Pigment colours can also be described by words, either single words or basic colour words modified by an adjective
eg carmine, scarlet, sage green, sky blue, navy blue, royal blue etc.

See the Farrow and Ball colour chart or the eleven Designer paint charts - for examples of pigment colours in practice.

Light

Colours of light are infinite, though the colours seen through a spectrum or in a rainbow are commonly defined as Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

Web Safe

Web-safe colours are 216 in number. The Webmonkey hexadecimal colour chart and the RGB Hexadecimal Chart (named after the six numbers and letters which define the colours) show these.
The Gotomy colour chart, with 216 hexadecimal and 138 named colours shows the Hexadecimal colours and gives 138 of these colours with their accepted names. By this means web designers can define their colours by name instead of by a six figure code.

Note that pigment colours reflect light,
colours of light transmit light
web safe colours project light from a cathode ray tube
or light emitting diodes which can be tuned for different effects.

Semantics of colour | Connotations of colour names