Applications of a Color-Naming Database

An ongoing web-based color naming experiment has collected a small number of unconstrained color names from a large number of observers. This has resulted in a large database of color names for a coarse sampling of red, green and blue display values. This paper builds on a previous paper, that demonstrated the close agreement for this technique to earlier results for the basic colors, and presents several applications of this database of color names. First, the basic hue names can be further subdivided based on a number of modifiers. Pairs of modifiers are compared based on actual language usage patterns, rather than on a fixed hierarchical scheme. Second, given a sufficient sampling of color names using memory color modifiers such as sky or grass, comparisons can be made to other studies on memory colors and preference for color reproduction. Finally, a dissimilarity coefficient can be computed for a set of 27 color names. Multidimensional Scaling can be applied to the matrix leading to a spatial configuration, which is solely based on patterns of color naming.