Basic color terms
English has 11 everyday color words. Some languages have two. The order they arrive in is surprisingly fixed.
- Basic terms in English
- 11
- Key study
- Berlin and Kay, 1969
- Follow-up
- World Color Survey, 110 languages
A basic color term is a short, everyday color word that every speaker knows and that isn't a kind of some other color. English has eleven: Black, White, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Brown, Purple, Pink, Orange and Grey. Crimson doesn't count, because crimson is a kind of red. Neither does Teal, because plenty of speakers never use it.
In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay compared color words across 98 languages, testing speakers of 20 of them on a grid of Munsell color chips. They claimed languages gain basic terms in a fixed order. With only two words, a language splits dark from light. A third word is always red. Next comes green or yellow, then blue, then brown, and last purple, pink, orange and grey.
That sequence explains an old puzzle. Homer never calls the sea blue, and blue words arrive late in many languages. It doesn't mean people couldn't see blue. Their eyes were like ours; they just didn't have a separate everyday word for it. One popular idea is that blue words wait for blue dyes and paints like Egyptian blue and indigo, since little in nature is reliably blue besides the sky. It's a hypothesis, not a proven rule.
The theory has critics, and it has been revised. The World Color Survey, which gathered color names from 110 unwritten languages, kept the broad pattern but loosened the strict stages. Some languages carve color in ways the scheme doesn't predict. Russian, for one, has two basic blues, which is where the debate over whether words change what we see gets its best evidence.
Swatches
- Dark · stage I
- Light · stage I
- Red · stage II
- Green · stage III–IV
- Yellow · stage III–IV
- Blue · stage V
- Brown · stage VI
- Purple, pink, orange, grey · stage VII
Colors
Sources
- Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press.
- Kay, P., Berlin, B., Maffi, L., Merrifield, W. R. & Cook, R. (2009). The World Color Survey. CSLI Publications.
- Hardin, C. L. 'Berlin and Kay Theory', Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology (Springer).
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.