Color by Number

It's the time of year when mail order catalogs start to drop through the Lounge Letterbox. One came through the other day with a garment featured on the front, identified as a "fleece-lined hoodie." What immediately grabbed our attention was not the name of the thing, but the color of it: a vivid, pleasing green, reminiscent of the green of a lawn. It's a shade of green that we in the Lounge, after consultation of each others' lexicons, would describe as kelly green. We turned to the product page and discovered that we were a bit off: the color is actually identified as sweet pea.

The avid gardener in us wants to object: the leaves of sweet peas actually have a slightly grayish cast, and not nearly as much saturation as the color of the pictured hoodie. But no matter: there's nothing not to love about sweet peas, and mail-order moguls clearly want to maximize pleasant associations (fragrance, freshness, novelty) with their products, with a view toward making a sale. Kelly green, though it would have been a more accurate description of the garment's color in the minds of many English speakers, is worse than so last season; it's so last century. Sweet pea, for this season anyway, is the new kelly.

Designating colors with words (and, as we'll see in a moment, with numbers) is a busy industry in English, and one that often leaves speakers of other languages and translators reeling. Perhaps in no other subject area is it more evident that English is truly the language that has to have a name for everything, and a name that can change according to the context.

As in most languages, the names of the principal colors in English are old (most of them in fact have roots in Old English) and usually not analyzed into simpler components. Dictionary definitions of principal colors tend to equate them with familiar, real-world objects that serve as reference points: red with blood; green with grass; blue with sky; yellow with lemons, and so forth. Our brains are hard-wired to some degree to latch onto these anchor colors and so it is perhaps no surprise that they present little challenge for translators, and that other languages deal with standard colors (as well as black and white) in a similar fashion, designating them with old, native words and defining them with reference to realia.

Once you step away from the main compass points of the color wheel, however, English gets more interesting, and more grabby. English speakers came into contact fairly early on with names of pigments and dyes through trade and cultural exchange and these words, mostly of foreign origin, have been kicking around in English for many centuries. Perhaps even more so than the principal colors, they have retained their power to evoke specific and vivid images: consider, as a sample, alizarin, bistre, cochineal, henna, indigo, lapis lazuli, ocher, saffron, sepia, umber, vermilion. Add to these the partly-overlapping list of color names with a real-world referent (whether natural or manufactured) such as amber, burgundy, chartreuse, ebony, fuchsia, ivory, lilac, olive, turquoise — all of which are also mainly foreigners with long-time, permanent resident status in English.

From the rich vocabulary available you might get the impression that English speakers are connoisseurs of color, but usage statistics tell a different story. While many "off-chart" color names are in the passive vocabulary of native speakers, many of the names are not sufficiently frequent in usage that people feel confident in some contexts to use them as guideposts for identifying colors to others. Despite the wide range of words to choose from, precise identification of color by a single name is a specialized area of English, a sort of trade jargon among what we might call the colorati: graphic artists, designers, fashionistas, and the like. Outside of this realm, there seems to be an association of precise color identification with femininity and fussiness. This may be a factor in putting people off using these words even if they know them. An unspoken rule says that real men don't say cerulean — they say "kinda light blue."

We compiled a survey of the collocates of a dozen of the most common color words in English (black, blue, brown, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, red, violet, white, yellow) in a large corpus and then, with the help of the VT's VocabGrabber, came up with these interesting stats: the three most common modifiers of these color names in English are pale, bright, and dark. Second-place contenders are deep, brownish, reddish, grayish, greenish, light, vivid, and yellowish. This suggests that, when faced with the task of fixing a color in another person's mind, we prefer to use modifiers attached to standard color names — rather than resort to the rich but somewhat obscure lexicon of minor color names. Describing a nonstandard color seems to be a matter of identifying the nearest hue, fixing the degree of saturation or chroma (pale, bright, dark, deep, light, and vivid do this) and then, if necessary, adjusting the result with reference to another color, usually one not so far away in the prism. Is it so in other languages? Perhaps readers of the Lounge will be able to tell us.

Such an imprecise, informal system for fixing colors does its job in colloquial English but falls far short of the task in the global world that English dominates — so of course other systems have developed to disambiguate color across language lines. One of the earlier and still most successful systems is Pantone, a color numbering system that is probably the most widely used system in branding today. As in so many areas of modern life, the Internet has necessitated new standards of color representation, first with a fairly primitive but standardized set of HTML color names. They can be identified by hexadecimal code in HTML web pages, and also by color name — that is, the English color name.

This scheme proved adequate for a short time but has now been supplanted by more sophisticated means of specifying colors for appearance on web pages. One such system supported by most browsers is the X11 system, a sample of which appears here from a Wikipedia page.

It is surely a matter of wonder to speakers of other languages that English has devised names for all these colors — indeed, it may be a matter of wonder to native English speakers. The Wikipedia page that this table appears on is translated into nearly three dozen languages on Wikipedia — but on all of those pages, even those of the "chauvinistic" languages that pride themselves on their independence and purity, no one bothers to translate the 150 or so English color names. This is probably just as well. Even native English speakers would probably not guess that Peru, as well as being a South American republic, is also a shade of orangish brown, and the possibility for something getting lost in translation if these color names were widely used is almost certain. For this level of precision, numbers do the job far better than words.