How Colours Got Their Names

Ask yourself first thing in the morning: what colour is an orange? The answer seems too obvious to bother with. It wasn't always. For centuries, in English as in French, there was no simple name for that shade sitting between red and yellow. People talked around it. Then a fruit turned up in the crates arriving in Europe, and it lent its name to the colour. Nearly every colour word has a story of this kind: an object, a plant, a stone, that ends up naming the shade itself.

A fruit that becomes a colour

The orange, the fruit, made a long journey. The word comes down from the Sanskrit nāraṅga, passing through Persian and the Arabic nāranj, then the Spanish naranja and the Italian arancia, before landing in Old French as orenge. Along the way the initial n went missing, most likely swallowed by the article: "une norenge" became "une orenge". The fruit was around long before its colour carried its name.

Before it arrived, what did people say? In Old English they spoke of geoluread, literally "yellow-red". In French, they described by comparison: the colour of saffron, the colour of fire. The colour name "orange" only really shows up from the sixteenth century, once the fruit was familiar enough to serve as a yardstick. It's a mechanism you find everywhere. Pink comes from the flower (in French, rose from the rose). Violet too, from the little violet. Brown, in French marron, is the chestnut. Purple comes from a shellfish, the murex, from which the Phoenicians drew a wildly expensive dye. The colour borrows the name of the thing, never the other way round.

Blue, the latecomer

Here's the point that trips up the most people. In many ancient languages, blue arrives late, very late, sometimes not at all. In 1969, two American researchers, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, compared the colour terms of dozens of languages. They noticed a strikingly regular order: a language begins by telling dark from light, then red, then green and yellow, and blue almost always turns up among the last to appear. Their work has been debated, qualified and criticised since, but that particular tendency holds up.

Careful not to jump to the easy conclusion. It doesn't mean our ancestors couldn't see blue. Their eyes were as good as ours. What was missing was the word, the mental slot for filing that shade on its own rather than folding it into green or black. It also happens that blue is rare in nature: few flowers, few animals, few stones. The sky and the sea, yes, but try catching a piece of sky to dye a length of cloth. The Egyptians did manufacture a blue pigment and had a word for it. They were rather the exception.

The wine-dark sea

The finest witness to this strangeness is Homer. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sea is regularly described with the phrase oînops pontos, translated as "the wine-dark sea" or "the sea with the face of wine". Honey is green, sheep are violet, the sky is bronze. A nineteenth-century British politician, William Gladstone, a great reader of Homer between spells as Prime Minister, combed through the poet and counted: black and white come up constantly, red now and then, blue never. He concluded, a touch hastily, that the Greeks saw colours poorly.

We know today that the explanation is subtler, and honestly still up for debate. Perhaps Homer was describing not so much the hue as the gleam, the movement, the dark shimmer of a sea at dusk. Greek wine of the period probably didn't have the deep tint of our Bordeaux either. What is certain is that where we instinctively reach for a colour name, he was reaching for something else. His palette of words didn't line up with ours.

Which is worth remembering next time an argument breaks out over whether some shade is blue or green, turquoise or teal. Those borders aren't etched in the eye, they're etched in language, and language makes do with whatever it has to hand: a fruit, a flower, a shellfish. The colour existed long before its name. Someone just had to haul in a crate of oranges to christen it.