Yellow
In antiquity, it was thought that jaundice – a disease that makes the patient’s skin yellow –it had something to do with bile, a secretion produced by the liver that tastes bitter and is also that color.
Physicians of that time called bodily secretions moodsand they played a central role in the hypotheses of the Greeks and Romans about the functioning of the human body – hypotheses that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages and were only questioned from the 18th century onwards.
The basic idea was that people got sick because there was an imbalance in the amounts of each liquid. – something that impacted not only physical but mental health.
This is where the contemporary meaning of the word “humor” comes from: originally it meant “liquid”, and has the same etymological origin as “moist”. A moody person was a person with unregulated moods.
Yellow bile was the liquid associated with choleric, aggressive behavior and was called «bitter humor.» In Latin, «bitter» was bitterwhich in the diminutive became amarellus. And hence the name “yellow”.
Brown
The Portuguese chestnut, the one from Christmas, is called Brown in French. And that’s where our «brown» came from. By the way, brown-glacé is originally a dark sweet made with Portuguese chestnuts (the version of the recipe with sweet potatoes was a Brazilian invention).
Orange
The fruit arrived in Europe by hitchhiking with the Arabs, as commercial activities in the Mediterranean increased at the end of the Middle Ages. It was called narandja (this is an approximate transcription of the Arabic pronunciation).
At the time, Europeans had no current name for the color located between red and yellow. In the same way that Portuguese, today, does not have a popular name for the color located between green and yellow. – some call it lemon yellow; others in lime green.
It was like this, filling a hole, that the name of the fruit also caught on in the chromatic spectrum.
Black
The name of the color black has the same root as the Latin verb premium, which meant “to press”. The association emerged from the fact that the color conveys a dense, thick, tight feeling (also notice the similarity between words like “black”, “hurry”, “impression” and “tight”).
Gray
There’s no secret: the name of the color comes from the word “grey” in its original meaning: the dust that remains after the combustion of something.
White
The name comes from the Franco-Germanic term blank, which meant “bright” or “polished”. Only later came the association with whiteness. It is not difficult to understand how: even today, when we have finished wiping the floor with a nice cloth, we are proud of the feat, saying: “Look at that, it turned whiter”.
Incidentally, the term “white weapon”, used to refer to knives and daggers, comes from there: white in the original sense of polished, shiny.
The word blank It still exists today in several Germanic languages. In contemporary English, for example, it gained another meaning: it means “gap”. Like the ones you have to fill in with the right word in school assignments. White ended up being associated with the void on the page.
Blue
It was a precious stone called lapis lazuli that christened the color blue.
Pencil it already meant “stone” in Latin. Hence comes “tombstone” and “lapidary”. In turn, “lazúli” comes from the Arabic lazurdwhich was the name of this bluish rock for the Moors (again, the transcription of the Arabic pronunciation is approximate).
In other words: the name of the stone is actually “lazuli”, without the “pencil” before it. The Arabic word ultimately comes from the Persian lajvard. The Persians (Iranians) used this mineral abundantly to decorate buildings and objects.
Red
In the old days, as nobody knew annatto or brazilwood in Europe, the only way to make red ink was to use a tiny insect – today called cochineal – which, when crushed, produced a red pigment.
Taxonomy was not the strong point of the Romans: for them, any small and unpleasant animal could be called a “worm”. “Red” comes from the diminutive vermiculus: «little worm».
To this day, French and English have the word vermillion, but it is not part of current vocabulary: it is often used by designers, architects, etc. to refer to a very specific shade of red, which is very bright and leans a bit towards orange.
With advice from Mário Viaro, philologist at the University of São Paulo (USP).