Distinguishing between warm and cool colors matters to all of us. That's a similarity that holds true across all of the languages and cultures studied. It turns out that even the languages with the fewest distinctions between colors divide them between warm and cool. Take the distinction between warm and cool colors. So cultures with only three color motifs are likely to progress in the finer discrimination among colors in similar ways. While some languages have as few as two or three basic color categories (or motifs, to use the language of the Survey), those color categories tend to be consistent across radically different languages, and there's evidence that suggests the evolution of language and culture proceeds in a reasonably predictable way.

There are volumes of scholarly work based on the Survey – enough to keep a gaggle of color-lovers occupied for decades, but one of the most interesting revelations is that it turns out that there are enormous similarities among and across languages in terms of how we categorize colors. The results of the Survey, published in 2009, provide raw data and analysis based on surveys of 2,616 people, speaking 110 different languages, most of them preindustrial. In the late 1970s, researchers initiated The World Color Survey to explore several hypotheses about how we think and talk about color and how languages evolve in terms of color speech. Well, as it turns out, these aren't new questions.

Words for orange color