title: The color lexicon of American English.
abstract: This article describes color naming by 51 American English-speaking informants. A free-naming task produced 122 monolexemic color terms, with which informants named the 330 Munsell samples from the World Color Survey. Cluster analysis consolidated those terms into a glossary of 20 named color categories: the 11 Basic Color Term (BCT) categories of Berlin and Kay (1969, p. 2) plus nine nonbasic chromatic categories. The glossed data revealed two color-naming motifs: the green-blue motif of the World Color Survey and a novel green-teal-blue motif, which featured peach, teal, lavender, and maroon as high-consensus terms. Women used more terms than men, and more women expressed the novel motif. Under a constrained-naming protocol, informants supplied BCTs for the color samples previously given nonbasic terms. Most of the glossed nonbasic terms from the free-naming task named low-consensus colors located at the BCT boundaries revealed by the constrained-naming task. This study provides evidence for continuing evolution of the color lexicon of American English, and provides insight into the processes governing this evolution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Mansfield, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Delwin T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Lindsey
authors.forename: Angela M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Brown
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D012660:Semantics; D014481:United States; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: color appearance; color categories; color naming