Artists universally use special words for the parameters of colour, but these words vary according to the system adopted in their education by their teachers. Most English designers and painters are likely to use such terms as:

Hue (for the dominant perceived wavelength - the position of a colour in the spectrum - red yellow, blue, etc). The word hue is almost universally used for this property by artists and scientists, including the C.I.E. (Commission Internationale de l' Eclairage).

Tone (for the darkness or lightness of the colour). The term Tone is used especially by painters and photographers. Scientists and technologist use Lightness (CIE), and architects and product designers, who tend to use the Munsell system, use the term Value. British Standards uses a gradation from light to dark, called Weight.(see below).

Colourfulness (for the gradation from the fullness of hue to the neutrality and therefore lack of hue in a colour). Colourfulness is used especially in printing and reproduction. Saturation is used by Dyers. Artists talk of the Intensity of a colour. Architects and designers most often use the term Chroma, being from the Munsell System. In British Standards, full colour is known as negative Greyness and colours are graded from Greyness and Black or White to full colour (negative Greyness).

Artists and designers have also tried to define the limits of their colour names and their colour-determining words by mapping these against the vanes of a colour solid, as in the Methuen Handbook of Colour and Colour Dictionary. Different proprietry paint colour-names were compared in the 1983 edition, as well as Munsell and CIE equivalents.

Of the many aspects of colour in relation to linguistics one of the most useful in schools has been that of Words in Colour devised in 1962 by Caleb Gategno which has had considerable success in teaching children to read and write English. The system consisted of colour-coding the different letters of the alphabet and groups of letters that stood for phonetic sounds in English and certain other European languages. The colour-coding includes white, yellow, rose, silver grey, blue, purple, red, terracotta, peach, khaki and green, which are used to make language-learning easy, both grammatically and phonetically. The learner is motivated by the playful nature of the system and is encouraged to discover the language, so that intelligence is fully activated. It has had great success in Australia and in the USA.

In the last century colour was used to identify the origin of different passages in the Bible. A theologian, the Rev. Dr Moore, professor of Theology at Andover, over-printed in different colours areas of text in the Book of Judges. Dark blue, for example, was used to indicate origins from an Ephraimitic work of the 9th century BC. Other colours were light blue, dark blue, light purple, dark purple, green and yellow.

In the 18th century, a novel by Laurence Sterne, called Tristram Shandy (1760), had a different coloured page in front of each chapter. This was to describe nonverbally the mood of the chapter. Then, in the late18th century, a Rococo book with different coloured print for each chapter was written by the Marquis de Caraccioli. A chapter on frivolity was printed in deep yellow, and one on toiletry in violet, now faded to brown. Other chapters were in red and blue.

In recent times, painstaking work has been done on the linguistic analysis of colour words and concepts by Mr P. Kay and others. Special aspects of linguistics are the anthropological and psychological. Many different hypotheses are being explored, and the results may well be of considerable interest to those who work with colours. It is hoped that it will be possible to publish here the results of these researches.

Bibliography

BERLIN, B. and KAY, P.(1969) Basic Color Terms, their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press
BULLOUGH, E. (1907) On the apparent heaviness of colours. London: Journal of Psychology, vol. 11 pt 2, May 1907. Discusses the concept of Weight, later adopted by the BSI.
BSI (1953) Glossary of Colour Terms used in Science and Industry. London: British Standards Institution. Published before the concept of Weight was adopted.
BS 5252:1976 Framework for colour co-ordination for building purposes. London: British Standards Institution. Weight is described as 'a subjective term for lightness modified as necessary to produce colours of the same character in different hues'.
COLOUR GROUP (1948) Report on Colour Terminology. London : Physical Society
GATEGNO, C. (1962) Words in Colour. Teachers' Guide. Reading: Educational Explorers
HEIDER, E.R. (1972) Universals in Color naming and memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology 93: pp.10-20.
HARDIN, C.L. and MAFFI, L. (1997) Color Categories in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Includes work on colour naming across languages.
KAY, P. (1975) Synchronic variability and diachronic change in basic colour terms. Language in Society 4: pp.257-270
KAY, P. and MACDANIEL, C. (1978) The linguistic significance of basic colour terms. Language 54 pp.610-646
KORNERUP,A and WANSCHER,J.H. (1978) Methuen Handbook of Colour and Colour Dictionary. London: Eyre Methuen. Includes colour atlas, maps of colour words and names, with CIE and Munsell equivalents, and proprietry paint names.
MOORE, G.F. (1848) The Book of Judges. London: James Clarke. Uses colour coding for highlighting the sources of various sentences and paragraphs in the Book of Judges.
PAVEY, D and DALAL, G. (1994) The Little Green Man, or road signs and visual symbolic systems. London: Micro Academy. Is a video on the use of colour and semiotics in a visual linguistic system.