So Live The Life

Googling colours

Google just keeps getting better. My eldest needs to find defintions for words every week as part of his homework so naturally we've been turning to the web. I found out yesterday that if you type "define:" into google (where is what you're looking for) then a whole lot of definitions come back.

Thinking I was being clever, I typed in "define:pink". After all, how do you define a colour ? Lots of results came back, but here's one that really caught my eye.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

"Pink is a color made by mixing red and white and sometimes described as being a light red, but it is more accurately a bright undersaturated red. There are many different shades of this color. "Pink" was not a color word known to Shakespeare: it was invented in the 17th century to described the light red in pinks, hardy carnations of the genus Dianthus, named from the "pinked" edges of their petals, appearing to have been cut with pinking shears."

It just seems so odd that Shakespeare would not have known this word. That you can invent a word for a colour. I suppose it's always happened, but I'd never ever given it any thought before.

My new colour word is bloon, for when black is tinged with maroon.

posted by Paul @ 1:37 PM