Current Events > How many colours are there?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Not shades, but genuine colours in their own right.

Red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown, black, white, grey, pink... is that it?
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Three.

Red, Blue, Yellow.

(or CMY)
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Mantis Shrimp
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possibly an infinite number
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DK9292 posted...

Not shades, but genuine colours in their own right.

Red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown, black, white, grey, pink... is that it?

Pink isn't a genuine color. It does not exist in a rainbow.

I'd argue that it's just red, yellow, green, and blue.

Anything else is just a mix of two or more colors.
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Same as the number of genders
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It's more a question of designating labels, not objective categories. It's arbitrary what we designate as a unique color.

Some languages/cultures have words for colors we don't, and others don't even have words for colors like orange or green. And it turns out that if you don't have a word for a color, you don't tend to recognize it as its own distinct color. So if English didn't have a word for "orange," you'd probably consider it a kind of red or maybe a kind of yellow.

"Some languages use as few as three color categories (words corresponding to black, white, and red), while the languages of industrialized cultures use up to 10 or 12 categories." (the first article linked below)

On the other hand, if orange were instead given two names (one for a reddish orange and one for a yellow-orange) and taught to you that way instead, you'd probably view those colors as "main colors" the same way you view something like green.

http://news.mit.edu/2017/analyzing-language-color-0918

http://theconversation.com/the-way-you-see-colour-depends-on-what-language-you-speak-94833
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Let me tell you about my friend, ROY G BIV.
He's a pretty colorful guy.
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Wetterdew posted...

So if English didn't have a word for "orange," you'd probably consider it a kind of red or maybe a kind of yellow.

Funny you should say that because English didn't have a word for "orange" for a very long time, actually. It used to be called "yellow-red". It was only called "orange" after the fruit orange was discovered.
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