How did the colors get their name?

This color's name derives from the Sanskrit word for the fruit naranga. (Yes, the color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around). ... Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to "yellow-red."Jan 28, 2014 read more

As different societies developed names for colors, across the globe, isolated cultures went about naming the colors, but weirdly, they all generally did it in the same order. Called the hierarchy of color names, the order was generally (with a few exceptions): black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue with others like brown, purple and pink coming at various times afterward. read more

To solve the puzzle of this color-name hierarchy, Tria and her colleagues devised a computer simulation with pairs of virtual people, or "agents," who lacked the knowledge of names for colors. One agent, the speaker, is shown two or more objects, invents a name for a color to describe one of the objects, and refers to the item by that color. read more