This article was first published In The Conversation on October 13, 2022.
When we open our eyes, a myriad of colours immediately appears before us. But they are not merely a decoration of our visual world: they enable us to identify objects, materials and substances in our environment. They also facilitate communication with other people. Thanks to them, we can tell the difference between a ripe banana and one that is still “green”. Or ask in a shop for the size of the “red” shoes we saw in the window.
Although the number of chromatic nuances that we can perceive is enormous, the communicative function of colours means that only a limited number of words are used to refer to them. This phenomenon is known as colour categorisation, that is, the grouping of shades in the same category associated with a word such as green, red, blue, or pink.