❤️Red, 💚green, 🩶grey and 🤎brown just evolved fairly simply from Proto-Indo-European colour names, with their meanings unchanged in the last 6000 or so years of evolution. The only twist being that “green” and “grey” seem to be from the same root.. There is no clear explanation for this, although something similar seems to have happened in ancient Celtic languages (e.g. Old Irish “glas” meant both “green” and “grey”). English “grow” is also from this root.
🤍White, 💛yellow, and 🖤black all appear to come from different words that meant “shine”. It’s unclear why PIE had so many words for shine, although probably they had slightly different meanings.
💛 Yellow is distantly related to English “gold”, and possibly “glow”. It’s origin may have meant the shine of gold. 🤍White is related to words for “white”, “clear”, and “light” in several other languages, and its root may have meant the shine of sunlight.
🖤Black comes from a word that meant “burnt”, which may be from a PIE root meaning “shine (like a flame)” and “burn”. This would make it related to “blank” and “blink”, as well as the words for “white” in many other European languages. Those are all the main colour words that English inherited directly from Old English: now we get into borrowings.
💙Blue is a borrowing from Old French, which itself borrowed the word (possibly so early that it was still a Latin dialect) from Frankish. Frankish was a Germanic language, and it actually had a cousin in Old English: blāw, which was replaced with the French borrowing. The PIE root for this word meant “yellow” or “blonde”, and how it shifted to mean “blue” in the Germanic languages is unknown. Going even further back, “blue” is connected to “black” via an early root that meant “to shine”.
💜Purple is a rare colour in nature, so no surprise this one is also a borrowing. It ultimately comes from the Greek name for Hexaplex trunculus, a type of sea snail whose secretions were used to make purple dye in the ancient Mediterranean. This name displaced the native Old English “godwebben”, with “godwebb” literally meaning “god web”, a name for an exquisite piece of clothing. Which makes sense, since purple was the most valuable dye.
🧡 And finally we have “orange”, the most recent of these words to join English, first being recorded as the name for a colour in 1502. Before that time, this colour wasn’t considered common or distinct enough to have its own name, and it was simply called “yellow-red” (“ġeolurēad” in Old English). The name of the colour is derived from the fruit, not vice versa as you may assume. Both the fruit and its name reached us via trade from its native range in southern India, passing through a string of languages on its way.
🩷Bonus: “pink” is likely derived from the pink (Dianthus plumarius), a flower. The etymology of the flower is unknown, so I missed it out of this image. -⭐🗝️