What’s that color above? If you’re English or American, your answer would probably be sky blue, or a light turquoise. But in Japanese it would be called mizu, which translates as “water”. The rest of ...

Color plays an important role in conveying visual information, but the language we use to express what we see is limited. Recent studies show that color terms used in Japanese also change over time.

It is striking that English color words come from many sources. Some of the more exotic ones, like "vermilion" and "chartreuse," were borrowed from French, and are named after the color of a ...