It’s autumn, the leaves in New England are spectacular, and it’s probably time to brush up on your color vocabulary. After all, anybody can say “look, a purple cow” — but why do that when you can call it “aubergine”? Or if the cow is blue, how about “azuline”? There are loads of available English words for colors, and many of them are pleasantly obscure. Sure, most people would make the connection that “sulphurous” means bright yellow, and some would even get that “viridian” is green. But how about “ponceau?” That one means a bright shade of red.
Similarly, “mauve,” “maroon,” and “magenta” probably call to find a light purple, a brownish red, and a shade of purple more toward red, but “modena,” “meline,” and “melichrous” are colors too; they’re red (crimson), canary yellow, and golden like honey.
Some color words have other meanings and it might not be instantly clear when you mean the color, not whatever else the word is used for. “Wallflower,” for example, is a person who’s shy and hangs back, but it’s also a shade of yellowish red. That’s probably the color of an actual flower called a “wallflower.” “Periwinkle,” “primrose,” and “goldenrod” are like that too; the words mean both the flowers and their colors. Everybody knows that “turquoise” is both a mineral and the color of the mineral (“topaz” is another one of those, as is “cinnabar”), but “terracotta” is a color as well as a kind of clay (the kind that’s terracotta colored). “Suede” is a kind of leather, and also a color (beige). “Stammel” is similar; it’s a coarse woolen fabric and it’s also bright red, which is the color the fabric is generally dyed.
Then there are a few color words that are based on something that’s a particular color, but the something might not be an everyday word. “Albumen” is the white of an egg, but most of the time “egg white” is more convenient, just like “white” is a lot more common that “albugineous,” even though they mean the same thing. You could say “lemon-yellow” instead of “citreous” and “red” instead of “haematic,” but then you’d never have the chance to explain that “citreous” comes from “citrus”, which is from the Latin name of an African tree we now call “citron”, and further back it comes from the Greek word “kedros”, which meant “cedar.” As for “haematic,” it means “blood colored” and is based on the Greek root “haima” (blood). Another dual-meaning Greek derivation is “heliotrope,” which is a signaling mirror, a sundial, and a color — but oddly enough, it’s not a shade of yellow resembling the sun; “heliotrope” is a shade of purple. That’s because the the color “heliotrope” comes from a flower that turns its flowers and leaves toward the sun. That’s not a characteristic of just one kind of flower, of course, and in botany “heliotropium” is a whole genus of plants.
Obscure color words range from the multisyllabic “ochroleucous” (off-white), “porphyrous” (purple), and “coquelicot” (bright red) to the terse “ibis” (sort of an apricot color, presumably similar to the bird of the same name) and the champion of brevity: “or.” In spite of being the shortest color word in English, “or” means two different colors: both gold and yellow. “Or” is used in a specific field, too: heraldry. Not too many people march around wearing their family’s coat of arms nowadays, making heraldry a bit of a hoary old specialty. But never fear, “hoary” is also a color. Appropriately enough, it’s grey.
