Many colour names originate from a specific plant, animal, mineral or place — 'orange' from the fruit, 'magenta' from an 1859 battle, 'ultramarine' literally meaning 'beyond the sea' — rather than being abstract labels invented for the colour itself.
The English word 'orange' as a colour name post-dates the fruit name; before it entered English, orange-coloured things were typically described as a shade of red.
Naming · English language
'Magenta' commemorates the 1859 Battle of Magenta in northern Italy, around the time a vivid new aniline dye of this colour was commercialised in Europe.
Naming · 1859
'Ultramarine' comes from the Latin for 'beyond the sea', referring to the pigment's historical import route from lapis lazuli mines in present-day Afghanistan into Europe.
Naming · Europe
Some colour names are directly named for a gemstone, flower or material whose colour they resemble (turquoise, amethyst, lavender, amber), a naming pattern that recurs across many languages, not only English.
Naming · multiple languages
Most English colour words outside the oldest handful began as the name of an object and drifted. The usual path is the thing itself, then a compound such as 'orange colour' or 'pink-coloured', and only later the bare word used as a colour. The dictionary record shows how slow the drift can be: the fruit is recorded in English in the late 14th century and the colour in the 1510s, while the garden flower called a pink is recorded in the 1570s and the colour noun by 1733. Until a word arrived, speakers borrowed a neighbour. Orange-coloured things could be called citrine or saffron, and pale red was 'incarnation', meaning flesh colour. 1
| When | Where | What happened | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| By the 9th century | England (Northumbria) | 'Purple' entered Old English from Latin purpura, a word that first named the shellfish and its dye; the form purpul is first recorded in the gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. | 1 |
| Late 14th century | — | 'Scarlet', until then the name of a rich cloth that was often but not always red, is attested as the name of a brilliant red; 'saffron' is used as a colour word in the same period. | 1 |
| 1510s | — | 'Orange colour' appears, more than a century after the fruit's name; the initial n of the Arabic and Persian word had already been lost on the way through Italian and French. | 1 |
| 1590s to 1781 | — | 'Ultramarine' named the lapis lazuli pigment from the 1590s and a colour resembling it only by 1781. | 1 |
| 1704 | — | 'Indigo', a dye name since the 16th century, was applied by Newton to a band of the spectrum. | 1 |
| 1733 | — | 'Pink' is recorded as a colour noun, after 'pink-coloured' in the 1680s and the adjective by 1720. | 1 |
| 1859–60 | — | 'Mauve' (1859, from the French for mallow) and 'magenta' (1860, after the battle of the previous year) arrive as names of new aniline dyes and of the colours they gave. | 1 |
| 1891 and 1906 | — | 'Beige', first an English word for a fine woollen fabric in 1858, is attested as a shade in 1891; 'taupe', the French for mole, follows in 1906. | 1 |
Claim: Taupe is named after the dove, from the German Taube.
Evidence: Not supported. That derivation was printed in a milliners' magazine in 1906, the year the word is first recorded in English, and the etymological record judges that it lacks evidence. The word is the French for a mole, whose fur is the colour meant. 1
Historical claims above are scoped to a specific period, region or culture where relevant — none are presented as a single universal fact. See methodology.