Short answer
Almost always from a thing: a dye or pigment, a plant, a mineral, a food, an animal, a place or an event. Of the 26 colour senses in this lexicon with a recorded first date, 9 were in use as colour words before 1700 and 12 appeared after 1850, when synthetic dyes, fashion and advertising multiplied the demand for new names. A name borrowed from a thing starts with that thing's range of colour, which is why these words are regions, not points.
Most English colour words beyond the basic eleven name a colour after something that has it. Dyes and pigments gave scarlet, crimson, vermilion, indigo, ochre and mauve. Plants and fruits gave orange, pink (the Dianthus flower), lilac, lavender, violet, olive, plum and fuchsia. Minerals and gems gave turquoise, ruby, emerald, coral, ivory and amber. Food gave mustard, chocolate, peach, salmon and cream. Animals gave teal (a duck), taupe (a mole) and camel. Places and events gave burgundy and magenta. Descriptive compounds — navy blue, midnight blue, burnt orange, hot pink — are the other main route. Even a basic term began this way: 'orange' named the fruit for more than a century before it was recorded as a colour.
The dated table below shows a cluster of new colour senses from the 1850s onward: mauve (1859), magenta (1860), burgundy (1881), terracotta (1882), chartreuse (1884), cyan (1889), beige (1891), then taupe, fuchsia, teal and aqua in the early twentieth century. The first synthetic dyes made strong, novel colours cheap, and each needed a name to be sold; mauve and magenta were dye names before they were colour names. Fashion seasons, mail-order catalogues and advertising then created steady demand for fresh names for familiar colours: teal is first found in clothing advertisements, and taupe arrived with a trade article that also invented a flattering origin for it.
Once a colour word is established it moves. Auburn went from whitish to red-brown. Mauve went from a strong dye to pale purple and, for many speakers, to a greyed pink. Taupe went from the dark grey-brown of moleskin to a light grey-beige in the paint trade. Crimson and scarlet stopped referring to cloth. Drift is the normal life of a colour word, and it is why the lexicon anchors each term on several dated, published values rather than one: the gap between a fixed CSS keyword value and a crowd survey from 2010 is itself evidence of where a word has moved.
The alternative to borrowed names is a system. In 1955 the US National Bureau of Standards and the Inter-Society Color Council published a method that divides the Munsell colour solid into 267 blocks, each named with a small vocabulary of hue words and modifiers — 'light yellowish brown', 'deep purplish red' — with block boundaries adjusted to follow common usage; it was combined with a dictionary of existing colour names and republished in 1976. It works at three levels of precision using names alone (brown; yellowish brown; light yellowish brown) and hands over to numerical notation beyond that. Its lesson for anyone naming colours is that evocative names sell, but modified basic terms communicate.
Paint, cosmetics and fashion brands coin names by the thousand, and each name belongs to one maker's one colour. The same word can be a pale grey in one range and a deep green in another, and a name may be withdrawn while the colour survives under another. These names are not part of this lexicon and are not matched to values here, both because they are proprietary and because they carry no shared meaning outside the brand. When a trade name is all you have, the useful move is to find the maker's own reference number and a physical sample.
| Name | Named after | Colour sense recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Scarlet | A fine cloth, often red | late 14th century |
| Crimson | Kermes dye, via Arabic and Italian (cloth dyed deep red) | early 15th century |
| Ochre | A clay pigment | mid-15th century |
| Coral | Red Mediterranean coral | mid-15th century |
| Orange | The fruit | 1510s |
| Ruby | The gemstone | 1570s |
| Ivory | Elephant ivory | 1580s |
| Indigo | The plant dye | 1620s |
| Chestnut | The nut | 1650s |
| Pink | Dianthus flowers | 1733 |
| Maroon | French marron, the sweet chestnut | 1791 |
| Lilac | The shrub | 1791 |
| Lavender | The plant (adjective 1840, noun 1882) | 1840 |
| Mustard | The condiment | 1848 |
| Turquoise | The stone, 'Turkish stone' | 1853 |
| Mauve | An aniline dye named after the mallow | 1859 |
| Magenta | An aniline dye named after an 1859 battle | 1860 |
| Burgundy | The wine region, via its wine | 1881 |
| Terracotta | Unglazed fired clay | by 1882 |
| Chartreuse | A monastery's liqueur | 1884 |
| Cyan | Greek kyanos, 'dark blue' | 1889 |
| Beige | Undyed wool (a fabric name from 1858) | 1891 |
| Taupe | French for 'mole', moleskin | 1906 |
| Fuchsia | The plant, named after Leonhart Fuchs | 1921 |
| Teal | A duck, in clothing advertisements | 1923 |
| Aqua | Latin for 'water' | by 1936 |
Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.
FactModerate evidence
Many English colour names are first recorded as colour words long after the thing they name: orange (fruit) as a colour from the 1510s, pink (Dianthus flowers) by 1733, maroon from 1791, mauve from 1859, beige from 1891, taupe from 1906 and teal from 1923.
Caveat: First-attestation dates in compiled references move when earlier uses are found.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
FactStrong evidence
The ISCC-NBS method divides the Munsell colour solid into 267 named blocks, with boundaries adjusted to reflect common usage of each name, and supports three levels of increasingly fine designation using names alone.
Colourwise analysisLimited evidence
Of 26 lexicon colour senses with a recorded first date, 12 are first recorded from 1850 onward.
Based on: Count of first-recorded colour-sense dates for lexicon terms in the etymology source.
Caveat: The set is the terms Colourwise chose for its lexicon, not a sample of all English colour words; older words are over-represented among the basic terms, which are excluded.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
Colourwise interpretationLimited evidence
The rise in new colour names from the mid-19th century reflects synthetic dyes and the growth of fashion and advertising, which needed names to sell new and familiar colours.
Based on: Mauve and magenta were dye names before colour names; teal is first recorded in clothing advertisements and taupe in a millinery trade article; the dated terms cluster after 1850.
Caveat: A reading of the dated examples, not a quantitative study of English vocabulary.
Reviewed 29 September 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.