Purple by Another Name Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Most of the colours used in this question got their names from flowers or fruits, a naming system that allows those who see the name to immediately understand what shade it is by recalling the referent object. Of course, not all plants have exactly the same colour (I am thinking here especially of orchids), so there is some ambiguity, despite general agreement as to what object might be so described. The colours violet, lavender, thistle, orchid, heliotrope, veronica and phlox all refer to the flowers of plants with those names. Mauve gets its name from the mallow flower.

Magenta gained its name from a synthetic dye originally called fuchsine (after the fuchsia flower) by its developer, François-Emmanuel Verguin, then renamed to magenta in honour of the 1859 victory of Italian and French forces in the Battle of Magenta, defeating the Austrians.

More abstract descriptions of colour are commonly used these days, often based on reference to a colour wheel. A colour wheel is produced by taking the linear spectrum of visible light and bending the two ends around so that red and violet are adjacent, rather than at the opposite ends of a line. A standard chart, called the Munsell Colour System, uses only five colours (red, yellow, green, blue, purple) to mark points of reference, with all other colours spaced between them.

Patriarch (a name first used in the 1920s) corresponds to purple in the Munsell Colour Scheme, and is, by definition, a colour that is exactly halfway between red and blue. (Its lightness is also exactly in the middle of that scale, described below.)

Phlox is also, since the 1960s, called psychedelic purple - it was very popular to use in black light art, and was reported to be Jimi Hendrix's favourite colour. On a colour wheel, it is between magenta and electric purple, which is itself between violet and magenta.

As well as describing the position of a colour in relation to other colours on a colour wheel (which is called its hue), a full description of a colour also involves describing its saturation (intensity of colour as perceived when the object is compared to a black and white image of the same thing) and lightness (purity of the colour, with different tints produced by increasing the amount of white that is mixed with the original colour, and shades by adding black). All of these can be measured, so those who wish to reproduce a specific colour can be given a set of numerical values to match. This is useful for those working in digital media, less so for those who are just mixing colours on a palette!