When we look at a color, we can often name it without hesitation. It’s easy to call grass green and apples red. Yet, when we step away from common hues that don’t fall under typical labels, naming colors becomes a bit trickier.
Mixing colors and making them lighter or darker can create new and unique colors, some of which might not have obvious names. So, what do we call those shades – do they even have names?
The Basics of Color Names
There are about 10 million colors that the human eye can see. Of course, those colors don’t all have a unique name. In the English language, most colors fall into one of eleven categories: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, black, white, brown, or gray.
Of course, there are some well-known variations of those colors that most people know the names of, such as turquoise, tan, amber, and magenta. However, even with those color names added, there are nowhere near 10 million names. Even adding color combinations like blue-green into the mix cannot get you close to the true amount of colors there are.
Why Some Colors Don’t Have Names
There are millions of visible colors but only a limited number of words to describe them. Thus, there are plenty of colors that we look at that don’t have a consistent color name. For example, some people might see a mix of blue-green and call it blue, green, turquoise, teal, or cyan. While all of those are close to each other on the color wheel, each name describes a different color. There are countless combinations of blue and green, not all of which have an exact name.
With our limited color vocabulary, we can’t make up a name for every color. Some colors are so similar that we’d end up calling them the same name despite having different hues. Since some people have better color vision than others, some might not even be able to see the difference between two similar colors. Naming every color is too much work, considering that millions of colors exist, so it’s much easier to describe them using the terms we know rather than create a new name.
How We Describe Colors Without Unique Names
When we see a color that we don’t know the exact name of, we usually use one of the following methods to describe it:
- Combine two color names, such as blue-green, red-orange, and yellow-green.
- Add light or dark, such as light blue and dark purple.
- Add an adjective to describe the saturation, such as bright red or dull green.
- Put “ish” at the end of a color, such as yellowish or reddish.
- Use other descriptive adjectives, such as mellow green or pastel orange.
- Use object names to describe colors, such as cherry red or flamingo pink.
If you’re looking at them on a screen, you can also refer to colors by their hex codes. While not every color has a name, any color that can appear on screens has a hex code, making it easy for you to find exact colors even if they’re not called anything specific.
New Paint and Crayon Colors Still Use Old Names
It might seem surprising that every color isn’t named by now, considering that physical art mediums like paints and crayons are always getting new names. However, those names typically aren’t really new. They often still include one of the main 11 color names, only with an adjective to describe it further. Those who don’t use traditional color terms often name them after objects of the same color, such as plants and animals.
So, while these names can help identify specific colors, they’re not unique colors that you’ll easily remember for future reference. In some cases, two color names could refer to the same color code, making it even harder to settle on a name for certain colors.
Examples of Colors With No Names
There are plenty of examples of colors without names. For example, the color labeled blue has a hex code of #0000FF. Anything slightly different will likely be called blue as well, despite being a completely unique color. But how can two different colors be called blue? When asked to differentiate the two, people might say “blue” and “light blue.” But what if there’s an even lighter blue? What would that be called? At a certain point, it becomes difficult or impractical to name a color. You could call it “light light blue,” but that sounds silly, and what would a lighter version of that be called?
A similar issue arises with complex color mixtures. Violet and magenta are two unique colors with their own names. But what happens when you combine them? It’ll likely give you a lighter purple or a purple with a hint of pink/red. It’s a pretty mixture, but what would you call it? Pinkish-purple might suffice. Yet, if you add more magenta into it, then what would it be called? It will still look similar, but it’s not exactly the same color. So, the two colors should have different names, but in everyday language, they don’t. And when it’s a complex mixture like that, it can be tricky to describe the color using existing color terms.
Thus, there are lots of colors out there that are tricky or even impossible to name. After all, we have a limited color vocabulary compared to the millions of colors we can create.
There Are Colors We Can’t Even See
On top of the millions of visible colors that are already impossible to name, there are also colors that aren’t visible to the human eye. The visible spectrum of light includes wavelengths from violet to red and everything in between. Yet, there are colors beyond the visible light spectrum, such as ultraviolet and infrared. Some animals, like the mantis shrimp, may be able to see colors beyond the human’s visible spectrum, but we can’t know what they look like with just our eyes.
Even though we can’t see these colors, they still exist. Of course, it’s impossible to name colors we can’t even perceive, which only adds to the list of colors without names in our universe.
Language Influences the Number of Color Names
Language affects color perception because different languages divide and name colors differently. English has 11 basic color categories, while other languages have more or fewer. Russian, for example, has 12 because it treats light blue and dark blue as separate colors. In that sense, it has more basic color terms than English.
However, some lesser-known languages have very few color terms. In Dani (spoken in Papua New Guinea) and Bassa (spoken in Liberia), colors are divided into light and dark. Other than those two basic color categories, there are no specific names for the many shades that exist. So, colors that have distinct names in English might not be named at all in other languages.
Study Shows That Some Colors Are Easier to Name Than Others
Since there are limited color names, there can be some discrepancies as to which color is “blue” or “red.” A study from 2017 focused on how long it took people to identify colors based on a name. They had a selection of colors in front of them and were asked which one represented a color name, such as “blue.” While some guessed the color the name was referring to right away, others needed multiple guesses.
People speaking English were able to guess warm colors (red, orange, and yellow) the easiest, while cool colors (blue, green, and purple) took more guesses. The study found similar results in other languages, with warmer colors taking fewer guesses than cooler colors. For languages with minimal color terms, the results were less consistent.
There are lots of explanations as to why this might be the case. First of all, the high intensity of warm colors makes them stand out, causing them to be easier to recognize. Cool colors are more commonly used as background colors where they may blend in, such as grass, sky, and water.
The color family also matters. Red and orange have fewer common varieties than blue, which has sky blue, turquoise, navy, teal, and many others. When someone says red, people are quickly drawn to the type of red associated with blood or fire trucks. And when people say orange, they think of the color of the fruit. But when someone says blue, there are likely a lot of variants of blue that come to mind, making it harder to point out the exact color.
Why It’s So Hard to Invent New Color Names
With about 10 million colors out there, making up a new name for each one is daunting. On top of that, our brains already process colors in a specific way, categorizing them into the color terms that exist in our language. Since there are plenty of ways to describe colors using the words we already know, it’s easier to follow that than to try to come up with a unique name for every color.
Also, naming two similar colors could cause more confusion than there already is. If two blues have different names but look nearly identical to some people, how will we know which one is which? Having more color names might make it easier to describe specific hues, but it could also make things more complicated overall.
Ultimately, how we describe them works well enough that we don’t need unique names for every color. Naming them would take a lot of time and effort, and the new names might not even stick. There are plenty of other fascinating things we can learn about colors without trying to name every single one. We can still explore, understand, and appreciate them in all their complexity.
