Colour names
Children’s books focus on teaching colour names from the eleven Basic Colour Terms. The colours portrayed in these books tend to be vivid colours only.
How do we decide how to name colours? And which colours have names? We can see millions of colours, yet only a handful are named in any language.
Basic colour terms.
In English, there are eleven Basic Colour Terms: black, white, red, blue, yellow, green, orange, pink, purple, brown and grey. Other languages can have fewer or more colour terms. Russian has twelve colour terms, with two words for blue: light blue (голубой, goluboy) and dark blue (синий, siniy). These colour terms represent the names of colours commonly taught to children, and become a fundamental framework for how we describe colours in our everyday lives, although sometimes the limited terminology of these eleven colour terms can restrict our experience of colours.
We encourage you to cultivate an awareness of all the ways of describing colours with all their variations, and notice the richness of colour in our daily lives.
