Color name

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A color name is a linguistic label that humans attach to a color. Such a color is determined by a physical color and/or some other physical features like reflection or iridescence. Sometimes naming of colors is limited only to describe the feature of a physical color.

Some colors with one color names can be synthesed from determined basics colours (e.g. RGB) with more than one manners (methameria (optical)) and some color names are not spectral one (purpure, brown).

Naming of colors is dependent on a specific language. There can be a vast and complex system representing determination of a color in a given language. Generally, naming of colors involves a vocabulary and a grammatical syntax.

As the color space is continuous, naming of colors involves quantization, often by a vocabulary that specifies gradual change of one color into another. For example, let us discuss the so called HSI color space, where each color has attached its numerical values of hue, saturation and intensity, which is enough to determine any color as defined in physics, perceived by a human. Each of the values can gradually change.

Thus, gradual change of hue can be described for example by names like 'red', 'orange red', 'orange', 'yellowish orange', 'yellow', 'green yellow', 'green', 'sea green', 'cyan', 'blue', 'violet' and 'purple'. Gradual change of saturation may for example be expressed by adding to a color name labels like 'grey', 'greyish', 'moderate', 'strong' and 'vivid'. Gradual change of intensity may be expressed by adding labels like for example 'blackish', 'very dark', 'dark', 'medium', 'light' and 'very light'.

Because such a way of naming colors can lead to relatively long names, shortcuts like 'pastel' for a color that is both light and moderately saturated, or descriptive names like 'olive (color)' for relatively dark, yellowish green, are used. Naming of colors goes outside determining just a physical color. For example, 'silver' describes a glistening surface that does not modify proportions in spectrum of the reflected light or in other words does not modify hue of the light, while 'golden' describes a glistening surface that reflects mainly yellow light.

Special kinds of reflection give names to terms like 'sparkling', 'metallic', 'aluminium', i.e. green metallic, and various forms of scattering, dispersion and diffraction of light by a surface may add to a color name terms like opalescent or iridescent.

A system of naming colors can be hierarchical. For example, a coarse categorization of saturated colors may divide the colors into red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Yet, within such a category, finer categories can be determined, i. e. within green sea green and olive can be identified. A finer category may belong to two categories at once, i. e. orange is a set of colors between red and yellow, that can be quantized into red and yellow.

1 Regularity
2 Standardized systems
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

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Regularity

A 1969 study Template:Ref by Berlin and Kay, has shown that there are substantial regularities in naming colors across many different languages. In the study, they identified the following basic color terms: black, grey, white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and brown. Today every natural language that has words for colors is considered to have 2 to 12 basic color terms. All other colors are considered by most speakers of that language to be variants of these basic color terms. English has the eleven basic color terms listed above. Russian has twelve, distinguishing blue and azure. That doesn't mean English speakers cannot describe the difference of the two colors, of course; in English, azure is not a basic color term because you can say light blue instead, while pink is basic because you don't say light red.

While the range in the number of basic color terms between languages may seem to highlight a striking difference, there is almost without exception a pattern to how these color terms are included among the basic color terms. As might be expected, languages with two basic color terms name black and white. Red is almost always next, followed by either green or blue. After this, the patterns are more complex, and Berlin and Kay's original results have had to be extended on more than one occasion to accommodate new data. However, many sociolinguists still agree that these patterns exist. See also Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

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Standardized systems

A computational system of naming colors can be quite complex, because humans perceive a color and name it in a complex way. For example, in the discussed HSI color space decreasing the intensity of yellow may change the color into dark green, instead of dark yellow. As another example, a given color can be pink for one subject and purple for another subject. One of the ways of reducing such inconsistences may be asking a number of subjects about naming a set of colors and then deriving, on basis of their answers and of a linguistic study on human color categorization, a computational model that determines a color name, possibly at a required detail level, by the position of the color in a color space.

Some examples of color naming systems are Munsell color system and ISCC- NBS lexicon of color names. The disadvantage of the systems, however, is the lack of an exact computational model of attaching a name to a given color sample. There are also several color naming systems that have such a computational model, yet they oversimplify the interpretation of the HSI or HSV color spaces.

Philatelists traditionally use names to identify postage stamp colors. While the names are largely standardized within each country, there is no broader agreement, and so for instance the US-published Scott catalog will use different names than the British Stanley Gibbons catalogue.

See also: X11 color names, Crayola

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