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Unusual colors like phlox and glaucous can seem a bit silly, but these odd colors can help us evoke so much more than conventional hues like "dark red" or "sky blue." The strange colors covered in this episode of The List Show might be familiar to you, but we bet you'll have fun incorporating them into your vocabulary.
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26 Colors You've Never Heard Of | Mental Floss
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0:00
You've probably heard of Tiffany Blue and Burnt Sienna, but what about Lusty Gallant
0:04
According to 16th century clergyman William Harrison, Elizabethan designers came up with
0:08
a bunch of creative color names as a marketing tactic to sell clothes. Lusty Gallant was originally the title of a popular ballad, and the dressmakers borrowed
0:16
the phrase for a shade of pink. Other creative colors included Poppin' J Blue, Peasparge Tawny, and Goose Turd Green
0:23
Hey, at least you know what to picture. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss, and welcome to The List Show
0:29
Today, I'm covering some colors of the rainbow that don't get quite as much publicity as
0:32
Roigie Biv, from puke to Isabella. One of those two hues has a potentially sickening backstory, and it's probably not the one
0:39
you think. Let's get started. Not even goose-turred green can rival the ick factor of a color called puke
0:51
Thankfully, this one is unrelated to vomit. Back in the 1500s, puke was a high-end wool cloth, often used to make gowns and stockings
0:58
The word came to describe the color those items were dyed, though there wasn't one universal understanding of what that color actually was
1:04
In the 1530s, scholar Thomas Eilett pegged it as between russet and black
1:09
Several decades later, linguist John Florio mentioned a deep dark purple or puke color
1:13
so it was definitely pretty dark. You can probably chalk up the inconsistency to a lack of quality control in the 16th century
1:19
dye-making industry. Whatever shade Shakespeare was picturing when he mentioned a puke stocking in Henry IV Part
1:25
I is lost to history. His use of the word incarnadine in Macbeth is much more clearly defined
1:30
In Act 2, Scene 2, Macbeth says this, Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand
1:36
No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red
1:41
In other words, there's so much blood on his hands that it could turn the ocean red
1:45
But there's one tiny problem with the verb incarnadine here. At the time, it didn't mean to turn something blood red
1:51
It referred to dyeing something flesh-colored, specifically the pale pink of white people's
1:56
and think carnations. The bard tweaked the meaning to better suit his story
2:00
or maybe just to fit the constraints of iambic pentameter But such was his influence that ever since Macbeth the term incarnadine has been associated with blood red The dull brown or yellowish brown of a dead leaf is called phillomate from the French term
2:12
fuit mort. It just means dead leaf. And that's not the only time English speakers have anglicized
2:18
a French phrase for a color. Verdeter is usually described as a blue-green hue from which the
2:23
verdeter flycatcher gets its name. It comes from the French verdeter, meaning green of earth
2:28
not to be confused with verde de terre, which means earthworm. Other color names have been
2:32
borrowed from French sans updates. Co-clico, meaning poppy, describes the vibrant orange
2:37
red of a poppy flower. In English, the purplish-blue of a periwinkle flower is simply known as periwinkle
2:42
But some Francophiles may prefer to use the French word, pervenche. One hue that had a particular hold over Western fashion and décor in the early to mid-20th
2:50
century was eau de nil, French for water of the Nile. As Katie Kelleher wrote for the Paris Review
2:56
It's a tricky color to pin down precisely. It is a light greenish hue, more saturated
3:01
than celadon, less gray than sage. It has tan undertones and a cool bluish cast
3:05
You can find a couple notable examples in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Costume designer
3:09
Edith Head dressed Grace Kelly in an Oud de Niles suit in Rear Window, and she reused
3:13
the color for tippyhedrin in The Birds. Speaking of birds, in the 1780s, naturalist John Latham described various species as rufus
3:21
meaning brownish-red or rust-colored. The term comes from rufus, a Latin word for
3:25
red—often something more like red-haired. Latham was the first person documented in the
3:30
Oxford English Dictionary to use the anglicized version, but the trend of describing wildlife
3:35
as rufous didn't stop with him. Today we have the rufous hummingbird, the rufous rat kangaroo
3:40
and more rufous-colored critters. I guess there weren't any mean naturalists around
3:43
that told him to stop trying to make rufous happen. Popping an O into the Latin word for a
3:47
color to form a newish English adjective was popular among early naturalists. Glaucus became
3:53
glaucous, typically describing a pale grayish blue or green, like the frosted, powdery coating
3:58
that forms on grapes and other fruit. Fulvus became fulvus, a dull brownish yellow, per
4:03
Merriam Think tawny like a lion mane Wenge describes a much darker brown specifically that of the Maledia laurentii a tree native to Central Africa Wenge wood is known for its durability and resistance to termites And why call a honey substance honey when you could call it melichris
4:20
In Greek, mele means honey. You probably know Xanadu as the title track of a trippy 1980 movie
4:26
musical starring Olivia Newton-John, or as the alternate name of the Mongol city
4:30
Shangdu dreamed up by Samuel Tiller Coleridge in his poem Kubla Khan. Xanadu is also a dull
4:35
grayish-green. Maybe not what you'd picture in a stately pleasure dome. But grayish-green
4:39
is pretty ideal for military uniforms. Feldgrau describes the shade worn by 20th century German soldiers
4:47
To botanists, phlox is a genus of more than five dozen plant species, some of which bloom
4:52
in bright pinks and purples. To artists, phlox is an especially fluorescent hue known as psychedelic
4:57
purple—a must-have on any tie-dyed T-shirt. And while doing research for this episode, we came across a totally silent 12-hour YouTube
5:04
video of a blank screen of the color flox, posted by Moodlight TV2. I'll leave it up
5:08
to you to decide what mood you'd toss that on your TV for. Vinacious is a descriptor that leaves a little room for interpretation. It just means, the
5:16
color of red wine. Somewhere a sommelier is rolling their eyes at such a sinful lack of specificity
5:21
Flame of burnt brandy is definitely a more imaginative term, but it might still cause
5:26
you to ask, what the heck color is that? According to an 1821 edition of the Ladies
5:31
monthly museum, the answer is lavender gray, pale yellow, and dark lilac
5:36
Fashionable Parisian women of the era favored it for bonnets, woolen gowns, and Spencers
5:41
Those short waistcoats you'd probably recognize from any Jane Austen adaptation ever
5:45
Well, the period-accurate ones, anyway. The clueless characters sported slightly longer blazers
5:51
Other colors owe their monikers to places on the map. Zolforino, in Lombardi, Italy, is the namesake of a purple-red dye discovered not long after
5:58
the Battle of Solferino, a decisive event in the Second War for Italian independence
6:02
Magenta, by the way, was named after the Battle of Magenta from the same conflict
6:06
If you're driving around Sweden and see a red barn, that color is commonly known as
6:10
Falun It gets its name from Falun a Swedish city once famous for its copper mines The byproducts of all that mining didn go to waste Locals combined them with linseed oil to make a rusty red paint that still the gold standard for farm charm today Labrador Canada didn just lend its name to a beloved dog breed Labrador Blue
6:27
is the muted grayish-blue associated with labradorite, a sometimes iridescent feldspar mineral first found in the region. Isabella, or Isabelline, describes a yellowish-brown
6:36
grayish-yellow, or some other faded neutral hue. It's presumably a nod to someone named
6:41
Isabelle or Isabella, but nobody seems to know which one. Around the start of the 19th century
6:46
British scholar Isaac Disraeli alleges that it was Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of Austria and co-ruler of the Spanish Netherlands with her husband
6:54
Archduke Albert VII. According to legend, Isabella refused to change her undergarments
6:59
until her husband successfully captured the city of Ostend in modern-day Belgium. The siege lasted
7:04
from 1601 to 1604, three whole years. As Disraeli wrote, the supposed color of the
7:10
archduchess's linen gave rise to a fashionable color, hence called l'isabeau, or the Isabella
7:15
a kind of whitish-yellow dingy. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that this theory is
7:20
quote, chronologically impossible, as the first written reference to Isabella-colored garments appeared a year before the siege even began. But it's also been suggested that it was Isabella
7:30
I of Castile who inadvertently created the color trend when she refused to change her
7:34
undergarments during the Siege of Granada back in 1491. Yet another possible provenance is that
7:38
But the shade was inspired by Isabella of Castile's great affinity for horses—pale-coated
7:43
ones in particular. Two royal Isabella's forgoing cleanliness for the cause seems dubious at best—not
7:48
to mention disgusting. So let's go with the horse girl theory. For the grand finale of this episode, I'll leave you with a so-bad-it's-good pun
7:57
What would you call the pale yellow on the inside of a banana peel? Paint company Benjamin Moore dubbed it banan-appeal
8:03
We've got an upcoming episode covering the coolest offbeat attraction of every state
8:10
in the U.S., and one after that covering places around the world. If you know of a flossy museum
8:15
building, natural landmark, or big ball of yarn in your backyard, drop it in the comments for a chance to be featured in those videos
8:22
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time
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