Where do colours get their name from?

Question

Where do colours get their name from, who decided to call orange "orange" or red " red", etc, etc. It's just a question that really bugs me.

Answer 1

This was Encyclopedia_John's answer on answerbag.com where the person asked basically the same question that you had

I looked up the colors red, yellow and blue (the primary colors) on Merriam-Webster Online. All go back to Old High German words for red, yellow and blue. This indicates that the names of these colors originated long ago during the time when the English (the germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes) were semi-barbaric and did not have writing. Thus no record survives of how these colors got their names or who named them.

Of the secondary colors, Green comes from the Old English word Growan, "to grow"; Orange comes from the Sanskrit word Narange, which is the word for the orange tree; Purple is from the Latin word Purpura, which refers to the fantastically expensive phoenician purple dye. Again, no one knows what person came up with these names.

Answer 2

I was about to do the same thing as Andrew T. to answer your question. Now that is obiously done. However, I did take note of somehting interesting above. Someone wrote that Red comes from Rojo, Rogue, etc..... correctly so. Did any one realize that Red is the universal sign of danger in Nature? If something is poisonness then it has a red marking on its' body somewhere. Animals that have red on its' body but are not poisoness just have it htere as a fake danger sign to their predators. Interesting since Rogue came out as one definition for Red.

Answer 3

Well, depending where in the world you live, red could be called "rogue", "rot", "rojo", "krazny", etc.

For that matter, why is a ball called "ball"? Word origins are a whole field of study. Many years ago, cavemen started realizing they could make different kinds of grunts, and started associating different grunts with different objects: that tame wolf became "dog", the stuff that grew out of the ground was called "grain", and bowel movements gave rise to the word "politician".

Answer 4

People.

Answer 5

And who decided to call an inch an inch, and a box a box, and a banana a banana, and Pepsi Pepsi, and um...yeah a LOT MORE

Answer 6

I like Andrew T's answer.

Answer 7

The words probably had there origin in some old language.
Very interesting question. Dunno the answer. Probably Andrew T is the closest to the answer.

Answer 8

thats just the way it is what else would you call red for eg.

Answer 9

oh come on this is intresting. why do they call red red. just like its july because it was after julius ceasar