Short answer
In a handful of recurring ways. A word for a thing becomes a word for its colour, often centuries later; a broad word gives up part of its range to a newcomer; a word changes the kind of thing it names, from a dye or a cloth to a colour; a trade attaches a word to a new product within a year or two; and a newcomer takes an old word's place. The Colourwise lexicon records 24 dated first uses and 29 relations of these kinds, each from a dictionary or study that states it. The dates are when a sense is first recorded, not when it was coined.
The commonest route is a name for a thing extended to the colour of the thing, and the gap is often long. Orange was a fruit in English before it was a colour word in the 1510s. Pink was a garden flower in the 1570s, 'pink-coloured' appears in the 1680s and the colour noun by 1733. Lavender was a plant from about 1300 and a colour from 1840; lilac a shrub from the 1590s and a colour from 1791; turquoise a stone in the 1560s and a colour name in 1853. Other languages show the same route. Russian goluboj comes from the word for a dove and its word for brown means 'cinnamon-coloured'; Japanese midori is said to have first meant new shoots; the Taipei word for brown is the word for coffee.
Old English rēad was used of shades that later had words of their own, pink and crimson among them, so the meaning of red narrowed as those words arrived. Japanese ao once covered green and blue; midori took green, with the separation placed in the ninth to tenth centuries, and within the last generation mizu has taken the light blues. Chinese qīng covered greenish to bluish colours in early texts and is now uncommon, with green and blue each under another word. In each case no one decided anything: a second word became available, speakers used it, and the first word's range shrank to what was left. The older range often survives in fixed expressions, which is why Japanese traffic lights are still ao.
Some colour words began as something other than a colour or a coloured thing. Russian krasnyj meant beautiful or fine, as its Czech and Polish cognates still do; red is a later sense. Purple was a dye and the cloth dyed with it, is recorded for the colour made by mixing blue and red from the early fifteenth century, and in the Middle Ages was also applied to dark, rich reds. Scarlet was a costly cloth, not always red, before it was a colour. Italian azzurro is attested from the ninth century for lapis lazuli and belonged to the written language; it entered everyday speech, according to the linguists cited by Del Viva and colleagues, only with mass schooling after Italian unification. Indigo went from dye to colour to a named band of the spectrum when Newton used it in 1704.
Commerce changes meanings faster than anything else. Mauve is recorded in English in 1859 as the name of an aniline dye, borrowed from the French word for the mallow plant. Magenta followed in 1860, named by its makers after a battle of the previous year. Teal as a colour is first recorded in clothing advertisements in 1923, and taupe in 1906 in the millinery trade, which supplied an invented and more attractive derivation along with it. A trade can also shift an existing colour word: in mainly American use khakis are light-brown cotton trousers, which pulls khaki away from the yellowish- or greenish-brown of the uniform cloth it first named. And a trade name can become an everyday word: Hungarian bordó, from Bordeaux and found in texts from 1897, was the twelfth most salient colour word in Budapest a century later.
A trade name differs from a colour term in what fixes its meaning: a maker's product, not speakers' agreement. That is why the same trade name can be reassigned to a different colour by the next maker.
Sometimes a new word does not divide a category but takes it over. Middle English ynde was replaced by indigo, borrowed afresh. Incarnate, 'flesh-colour', did the work of pink and then drifted towards crimson. Italian blu arrived from French at the end of the seventeenth century for dark blue and is now reported as a frequent umbrella word for the whole blue area, at the expense of azzurro. The authors of the Hungarian field study suggest bordó may have moved into the place of vörös, and note that French marron has been ousting brun in the same way. In Taipei a loanword has overtaken two older words for brown. These are the cases where a text's date decides the translation.
A date in an etymological dictionary is the earliest use its compilers found. It is an upper bound on when a sense arose, it moves earlier when new evidence turns up, and it says nothing about when the sense became common. The dates here come from a compiled reference, not from the Oxford English Dictionary, so they are given as the source words them, as decades or parts of centuries where it does. Direct observation of change is rarer and more recent: two Japanese naming studies thirty years apart, and a comparison of colour naming in Nafaanra at two dates about four decades apart, whose authors report that the system changed while staying near the efficient trade-off their model predicts.
| Term | Sense that is dated | First recorded |
|---|---|---|
| gwyrdd, Welsh | earliest citation in the dictionary | ninth century |
| azzurro, Italian | first attested, for lapis lazuli | ninth century |
| celeste, Italian | colour sense, light shades of blue | thirteenth century |
| violet, English | colour name | late 14th century |
| scarlet, English | colour name | late 14th century |
| purple, English | the colour made by mixing blue and red | early 15th century |
| orange, English | colour word | 1510s |
| indigo, English | the colour of indigo | 1620s |
| blu, Italian | entered Italian | end of the seventeenth century |
| pink, English | colour noun | by 1733 |
| maroon, English | very dark red or crimson colour | 1791 |
| lilac, English | colour name | 1791 |
| lavender, English | colour adjective | 1840 |
| turquoise, English | colour name | 1853 |
| khaki, English | dust-coloured cloth | 1857 |
| mauve, English | aniline dye | 1859 |
| magenta, English | aniline dye and its colour | 1860 |
| burgundy, English | colour resembling the wine | 1881 |
| cyan, English | greenish-blue colour | 1889 |
| beige, English | shade of colour | 1891 |
| bordó, Hungarian | found in its present form in Hungarian texts | 1897 |
| taupe, English | dark brownish-grey colour | 1906 |
| fuchsia, English | red colour like that of the flowers | 1921 |
| teal, English | shade of dark greenish-blue | 1923 |
| Term | Relation | Term | What the source shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| 青 (ao), Japanese | came before | 緑 (midori), Japanese | Japanese ao once covered green as well as blue; midori took over green, with the separation placed in the ninth to tenth centuries. |
| 青 (ao), Japanese | came before | 水 (mizu), Japanese | The light blues that Japanese speakers now call mizu were ao for most observers a generation earlier. Eleven basic terms without mizu among ten observers in 1987; mizu used by 98% of 57 informants in 2017. |
| 青 (qīng), Mandarin Chinese | came before | 藍 (lán), Mandarin Chinese | Chinese 青 qīng covered greenish to bluish colours in early texts; blue is now 藍 lán, and qīng is uncommon. |
| 青 (qīng), Mandarin Chinese | came before | 綠 (lǜ), Mandarin Chinese | Chinese 青 qīng covered greenish to bluish colours in early texts; green is now 綠 lǜ. |
| azzurro, Italian | came before | blu, Italian | Azzurro is the older Italian blue word and the one linguists gave as the basic term; blu arrived from French centuries later and is now the most widespread. azzurro attested from the ninth century; blu from the end of the seventeenth. |
| vörös, Hungarian | came before | bordó, Hungarian | The authors of the Hungarian field study suggest that the loanword bordó may have moved into the place vörös once held. bordó listed by 21 of 40 people, vörös by 12. |
| red, English | came before | pink, English | Old English rēad was used of shades that later got their own words, pink among them; pink is not recorded as a colour name until the eighteenth century. |
| incarnation, incarnate, English: flesh-colour | came before | pink, English | Before pink, English used incarnation and incarnate, 'flesh-colour', for a pale red; the words drifted towards crimson. |
| citrine, saffron, Middle English: yellow-red colours | came before | orange, English | Before orange was a colour word, colours like it might be called citrine or saffron in Middle English. |
| ynde, Middle English: indigo; blue | came before | indigo, English | Middle English ynde, from Old French, was replaced by indico and then indigo, borrowed afresh through Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. |
| mauve, English | is a trade reinterpretation of | mauve, French: the mallow plant | Mauve reached English as the trade name of an aniline dye, called after the purple markings of mallow petals. Dye name 1859. |
| magenta, English | is a trade reinterpretation of | Magenta, Italian: a town in Lombardy, site of a battle in 1859 | Magenta is a dye-maker's name: a crimson aniline dye called after a battle fought the year before, like the dyes named magdala and solferino. Dye and colour 1860. |
| teal, English | is a trade reinterpretation of | teal, English: the small freshwater duck | Teal as a colour is first recorded in clothing advertisements, after the markings on the duck's head and wings. Colour sense attested from 1923. |
| taupe, English | is a trade reinterpretation of | taupe, French: a mole | Taupe, the colour of moleskin, was promoted in the millinery trade, which also put about a more flattering origin from the German word for a dove. Colour 1906. |
| khakis, US English: loose cotton trousers, usually light brown | is a trade reinterpretation of | khaki, English | In mainly American use khakis are casual cotton trousers, usually light brown, which pulls the colour word towards a paler tan than the yellowish- or greenish-brown of the uniform cloth. |
Why: The word named a dye or a cloth when the text was written, and its colour range was wider or different.
Fix: Check the word's dated senses in a historical dictionary for the period, and describe the object, not the modern swatch.
Why: The trade name was fixed by one maker's product and has been reused for others since.
Fix: Match from the maker's reference or a measured value; treat the name as a label.
Why: A newcomer has taken over the category since the glossary was written.
Fix: Check current usage with speakers of the target age group and region, not only a dictionary.
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
Orange is not recorded as a colour word in English until the 1510s; pink is recorded as a flower name in the 1570s and as a colour noun by 1733.
Caveat: First attestations from a compiled etymological reference; the Oxford English Dictionary was not consulted and earlier uses may exist.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
FactModerate evidence
Indigo is recorded in English for the dye from the 1550s, for the dye's colour from the 1620s and as the name of a colour of the spectrum from 1704.
Caveat: First attestations from a compiled etymological reference.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
FactModerate evidence
Italian azzurro is attested from the ninth century and blu entered Italian at the end of the seventeenth century as a loan from French; blu is now reported as the most widespread Italian blue term.
Caveat: The dates and the claim about present-day spread are the paper's summary of Italian linguistic scholarship, not its own data.
Source: Florence “blues” are clothed in triple basic terms (i-Perception 13(5), 2022); Vocabolario Treccani (entries azzurro, blu)
FactModerate evidence
The Russian colour word krasnyj acquired the sense 'red' secondarily; its earlier sense, kept by its cognates in other Slavic languages, is 'beautiful'.
Source: Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language (Max Vasmer; Russian edition, online)
FactModerate evidence
Mauve (1859) and magenta (1860) entered English as names of aniline dyes, and teal (1923) and taupe (1906) are first recorded as colour names in the clothing and millinery trades.
Caveat: First attestations from a compiled etymological reference.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
FactLimited evidence
Colour naming in Nafaanra changed over about four decades while remaining near the efficient trade-off predicted by a data-compression model.
Caveat: Taken from the paper's abstract only; the full text could not be read, so no details of the change are given.
Colourwise interpretationModerate evidence
A trade name is fixed by a maker's product and a colour term by speakers' agreement, which is why trade names shift meaning faster and why some, such as Hungarian bordó, later become ordinary colour words.
Based on: The dated trade origins of mauve, magenta, teal and taupe in the etymological dictionary, and the salience of the loanword bordó in the Hungarian field study.
Reviewed 6 October 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.