Where Do Color Names Come From?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Stephen Shine, and I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Hi, thank you. Well, today I have a question about colors.

A while back in college, I’d studied French, and then we learned about the colors.

And it’s got me thinking recently, why in English do we take some colors from French but not others?

For example, there’s blue and orange, which is blue and orange.

But there’s also noir and blanc, but in English we use black and white.

And then there’s also some other ones like marron, which sounds like maroon, but it’s more chestnut color,

And then brun, which sounds like brown, and it is brown, but it’s not brown.

So I normally wouldn’t know where to start with researching this question,

But since I’m a longtime listener, I figured maybe you two might be able to help answer this and get to the bottom.

And boy, howdy. Yes, we can.

So your question is, why do some of our colors come from French and some of them from somewhere else?

Yeah, I guess why is it cherry-picked?

I mean, I guess in cuisine we might be taking a lot of French words or maybe not.

So I guess in colors, which is so, like, elementary, I guess, why is it so like this but not that?

Dude, that’s your clue, Stephen.

The elementary nature of the colors is the clue.

There’s this crazy thing that happens in languages, is that as languages mature, they add words for colors in approximately the same order almost always.

That is, they first start with black and white, and then they add red, and then they move on from there and they start adding colors.

So the newer, that’s in quotes because new is a problem word, but the newer a language is, the less likely it is to have names for all the colors and the more likely it is just to have black and white and red.

So all of the colors that don’t come from French tend to be from languages from which English is descended before French ever had a role in English being English.

So from Old Norse and Old Saxon, for example, and before that from Proto-Germanic.

And before that, the, you know, the Proto-Indo-European.

So black, white, red, green, yellow, those first five, they come from Old Norse or Old Saxon.

And then we get to the newer colors that come from Old French.

That’s blue, brown, Old Germanic, purple from Latin, orange from Old French, but via Arabic and Persian from Sanskrit.

And then pink, which just blows people’s minds, is modern English, maybe Middle English, depending on how you want to count.

And it’s only from the 1600s.

Pink is a relatively new color added.

And pink doesn’t exist in that many languages as a perfectly synonymous word that you can say pink,

And English is the same as pink in another language.

So it’s really, really complicated.

But the longer a word has been in English, the more likely it is to come from the older languages that English sprang from.

Well, that is just fascinating, especially that pink is, you know, again, if we’re using invisible air quotes, new.

Yeah, new.

New? Huh. That is so interesting.

There’s a great book that I want to recommend to you. You can get it at bookstores just about anywhere. Order it online.

It’s called The Secret Lives of Color, and it’s by Cassia St. Clair.

And she’s written this amazing book that really gets into the etymologies, but the histories of the colors,

The ones that come from bugs or other kind of living life,

The ones that are directly associated with, say, certain empires or certain royalty.

And the thing I love about it is that every entry for a color, the color itself is on the page.

So often when I have these books or even articles that talk about colors,

They’ll talk about a color like vermilion and compare it to, say, crimson,

But they won’t show me how those colors differ from each other.

And this book does that.

So it’s called The Secret Lives of Color by Cassius St. Clair.

That sounds fantastic.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for throwing water on this curiosity of mine that’s, I guess, been burning for a bit.

Well, maybe it’s water so the seeds grow, not water to put out a fire.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Thank you very much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Absolutely.

Bye-bye.

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