Talk:Purple

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[edit] Comment about purple and violet

PURPLE AND VIOLET ARE NOT SUPPOSE TO BE DIFFERENT. IN FACT, THEY ARE THE SAME (but only according to the widest of the three definitions of "purple"). By error the same article called: 'Purple, the colour from the sea' has been listed three times

Merge all in PURPLE - it is correct colour name for lock colour circle. Alexandrov 14:42, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Purple in Royalty

Actually Purple in royalty clothings is nos a violet-like color, but actually a blood-red shade

[edit] CMYK Colours

Seems to be wrong. They should be in the range 1-100, but seem to be in the range of 1-255

Even assuming they have been renormalised into a [0, 255] scale, the CMYK and RGB values do not correspond. --Phil | Talk 16:41, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed this several years ago. It is because an 8bit value can hold the range 0-255. However, Photoshop, amongst others, uses the scale 0%-100% for the ink coverage.

Should I edit the colours to include this range as well? Vryl 09:07, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

I want to see these boxes removed entirely, and removing the nonsense CMYK would be a good start, but I am having very little luck generating discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Color. It is probably best not to change individual boxes outwith the project. Notinasnaid 10:28, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


Is there a cannonical list of colours anywhere on the web? I will go thru and make it sensible if something like this can be found Vryl 11:20, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

There should be no CMYK in these tables. See the project discussion for why I think why. I would like to go further and show no colors unless they are clearly described as only web colors. Notinasnaid 12:44, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] List of terms associated with the color purple

At least some of these should be incorporated into this article. anthony (see warning) 22:36, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Purple vs. Violet

How often do people talk about using purple vs. violet in the sequence red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple/violet?? 66.245.21.160 23:25, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It would be nice if someone would write a purple vs. violet article -- neither purple nor violet (color) explains the difference. I was raised with box of Crayola crayons, so I've always considered them to be the same, preferring the term "purple" in my own speaking simply because I think of "violet" as a flower. --Birdhombre 20:11, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The sequence is red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet. Indigo and violet are both purple: indigo is more blue, violet is more red. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 15:51, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)
I agree: violet & indigo are both kinds of purple. Have a look here. Though a violet & indigo vs. purple article could be useful. Jimp 26May05
The article speaks as if violet were not a kind of purple. This should be corrected. Jimp 7Jun05
Violet is not purple. Violet is just violet.
Violet is actually closer to blue than purple. It would be more appropriate to call it a kind of blue than a kind of purple. But it's neither. It's just violet.
It doesn't look blue. It looks purple. This is why I'm in the habit of calling it a kind of purple. How about you? Why is it that you say violet is not a kind of purple? Jimp 15Jun05
Because it's just violet, just like mathematics is not a science, it's just mathematics. Many people though, think that purple and violet are synonyms.
Mathematics is not a science because it's truth-preserving and therefore is not falsifiable. Where's the logic behind saying violet is not a kind of purple. If there are many people who say it is, why are they wrong? Jimp 19Jun05

All this stems from a confusion between a technical term (Violet I): "violet as the most extreme colour of the spectrum" — also called "blue" (and indeed empirical research shows many people(s) call this blue) and a term from common usage (Violet II): "violet as a hue of purple that is more blueish". This confusion is made worse by the deplorable habit of artists to paint spectra that are grossly incorrect in that they show a purple (Violet II) hue sector next to the blue (Violet I) one and the deplorable nature of Nature to rarely show us a correct spectrum. Rainbows in particular can be very deceptive, often daring to flaunt a reddish purple ;o).--MWAK 05:44, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I found the content of the page a bit confusing, and abbreviated it to highlight the distinction MWAK makes. I've also added discussion over on color wheel about Newton's color wheel. Nbarth 10:05, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Crayola made it up

One of my friends is rather adamant that "purple" is really a word that was created by Crayola to describe what would before have been called violet. Does anyone know of any uses of the word purple before Crayola? Or lack thereof? Mythmon 05:40, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

The word purple is much older than Crayola. E.g., Shakespeare uses it a number of times. If you check the OED, I'm sure you'll find even older examples. --Zundark 19:27, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hmmm...

Some of the facts in this article seem to be against Wikipedia:No original research! Where are our sources for this info? - Ta bu shi da yu 10:41, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Can you be specific, which parts? --Pjacobi 11:01, 2005 Feb 25 (UTC)

[edit] What does that mean?

The article states:

(the line of purples) represents one limit of human color perception. Is this really a limit of perception? The line of purples contains "colors" that actually don't exist as spectral colors, so i would say it is some sort of enhancement. Actually, the article Purple line could be created. Thanks, --Abdull 13:44, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it's a limit, because you can't see anything beyond the line of purples. Line of purples would be a better name for the article. --Zundark 19:10, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Which CMYK?

As I said in Talk:Cyan I am very dubious about the color boxes that have appeared. What algorithm was used to make the CMYK values here? Why that rather than another one? And if purple has been standardised in RGB, what is the standard used? Notinasnaid 14:24, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In answer to your last question, purple is standardized as (128, 0, 128) in sRGB colour space in the HTML, CSS and SVG specifications. This is a different RGB triplet than the one in the colour box.
I would like to see these colour boxes removed, or at least fixed so that they make sense. The choice of RGB triplets is arbitrary, and the boxes don't even say which RGB colour space is intended. Similarly for CMYK, which in any case should be expressed as percentages. --Zundark 21:46, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Picture

The picture is too blue. 207.224.177.252 17:38, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Well, the most likely reason you say this is mentioned at Talk:Violet (color) under the heading "Color of picture" depending on the kind of screen your computer uses. Georgia guy 23:33, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Purple in nature

Why is the color purple so rare in nature compared to other colors?? Georgia guy 01:19, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

My guess is that according to the chromaticity diagram, there are fewer shades of purple than any other color. By contrast, green, the color most common in nature, has more shades than any other color. Evan Robidoux 04:21, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why Purple was Limited to the Rich

the article mentions that it was limited to the rich but doesnt explain that it was so expensive because thousands of sea snails had to be crushed to get even a small amount of the pigment. unless someone replies to dispute this ill add it later.

[edit] Purple vs. Mauve

As well as the confusion between purple and violet, I've also encountered confusion between the words purple and mauve. My grandma refers to all shades of purple as "mauve". I've heard other people here in Britain, mostly elderly, doing the same thing. Infact I only just found out from reading the page mauve that there is a distinction, and that the two terms are not interchangeable. Why no mention of this confusion either here or at mauve? How common is this? --Krsont 22:46, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Purple/Violet Contradiction

Compare "But technically purple is the name of the colour group of many such as violet [...]" and "Technically, violet is a spectral color [...] while purple is [...] the only color [...] that is not a spectral color". (Quotes were greatly abbreviated.) The first says that violet is a type of purple. The second makes it clear that violet can't be a type of purple. I have no idea which is more correct, but something needs to be changed or clarified about these two "technical" statements. -- Zawersh 22:15, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

The problem seems to me that most color articles are written from instinct rather than research, and converge on an uneasy balance between intuition and color science. This would largely be solved if people followed the Wikipedia rules and cited sources for everything. Notinasnaid 10:37, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Until the sources ended up contradicting each other. Yeah, I'd noticed that too. I'm not a colour scientist but my instinct tells me that violet is a kind of purple. Might it be wrong? It's a question of definition. What's the definition of purple? The word predates Newton. Jimp 17:29, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
There's really no problem with contradictory sources either. The article can present (without taking favourites) the range of information in the sources. Makes an article more interesting. You're right that this is a lot to do with definitions; bear in mind it may be a purely English language problem, as other languages may not even have different words, or may define them differently. Notinasnaid 18:07, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
Absolutely. As an example of sources' disagreeing, Cambridge defines purple as "of a dark reddish blue colour" and violet and indigo as "(having) a bluish purple colour". The American Heritage Dictionary, on the other hand says purple is "Any of a group of colors with a hue between that of violet and red. ...", violet is "The hue of the short-wave end of the visible spectrum, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 380 to 420 nanometers; any of a group of colors, reddish-blue in hue, that may vary in lightness and saturation." and indigo is "The hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between blue and violet, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 450 nanometers; a dark blue to grayish purple blue." Jimp 06:52, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

I would take objection to the phrase "violet light varies solely by wavelength", which seems to imply that violet is a single wavelength. Violet is any spectral distribution the bulk of whose wavelengths are shorter than those characteristic of blue light. Also there is no hard line between violet and purple -- violet gradually shades into purple as long (red) wavelengths gradually enter the spectrum, becoming red when the short wavelengths become negligible. It should also be noted somewhere that, at least for primates, perceptual color space is only a tiny 3-dimensional subspace of infinite-dimensional spectral color space -- the projection of the latter onto the former identifies many physically distinct colors that are perceptually identical. Some birds perceive four dimensions, other creatures only two or even one (brightness perception only). It is difficult to reason reliably about the nature of color without a good grasp of these distinctions. Vaughan Pratt 18:30, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Words that rhyme with purple

This section seems to be unnecessary and made up entirely of nonsense words. --Serogi 07:57, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, I want you to check out the Orange (word) article and see that there are now 2 colors with names like this. Georgia guy 13:40, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
That's Orange (word), not Orange (color) . Also, Orange is notable for being a word that has no rhyme in the English language, hence the analysis. There's no reason for it on Purple, nor does a Purple (word) article exist. wikipediatrix 19:19, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
But, how is orange notable for being a word that doesn't rhyme but purple is not?? How is purple different from orange?? Georgia guy 19:38, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
1. Because there are words that rhyme with Purple. 2. Also because Orange being the only color that has no rhymes is inherently notable to literary types, for whom this is a well-known phenomenon. 3. This phenomenon is what makes the nonsense words that people have used to force a rhyme with Orange notable. 4. The nonsense words that someone added for purple have no sources cited. It's not enough to just say that "blurple" or "ghdgdgzurple" rhymes with Purple, one has to have an encyclopedic reason for their inclusion. One could just easily go to, say, the Tom Cruise article and mention that his name rhymes with "bruise" or "ghdgdgzruise", but it's not relevant information for an encyclopedia. wikipediatrix 00:21, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
Name some real words that rhyme with purple. Georgia guy 00:24, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
It depends on how strictly you want the rhyme: vowel-based or strictly consonant-based. If vowel-based, then "girdle", "turtle" and "verbal" rhyme with Purple. If strictly consonant-based, then "hirple" and "curple" rhyme with Purple. However, all this is completely beside the point, for reasons I have already explained. wikipediatrix 00:33, 29 May 2006 (UTC)



[edit] Non-parseable sentence

I think someone accidentally cut a line out of the following:

  "Purple as one of the liturgical colors in Christian symbolism can express sorrow and mourning.(symbolized by blue and red,    
  respectively), as opposed to the more common coalitions of the Christian center-party with one of the other two. From 1994–2002 there 
  have been two purple cabinets—see also Politics of the Netherlands and Paars (the Dutch word for "purple")."

This maks no sense!

[edit] Another poorly worded statement

After some thought, i figured out what is meant by the final sentence under Aubergine:

  "It is interesting to note that the red and blue values of this color are an opposite mirror to those of the color 'generic purple' shown above.

What this means is that Generic Purples RGB values are flipped to get Aubergine. This statement adds very little, if any, value to the article since RGB space is neither an absolute nor linear color space. This is only of interest in a numerological sort of way, i.e. pseudoscience. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.195.133.75 (talk) 21:20, 5 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Personal computer (Apple?!)

Why is it relevant to assert that the personal computer was introduced by Apple Computer, Inc?! It's quite a stretch to say that this is the first machine that ever was capable of producing these colours...

[edit] Between blue and red

The lead sentence uses the phrase "between blue and red", but that assumes a model of color ordering. On the spectrum, after all, the colors between blue and red are green, yellow, and orange. I think the real meaning may be a reference to human perception, where purples (including violet) are colors seen as similar to blue and red; or maybe it is just referring to the color wheel (a concept based on human perception also). Probably something more verbose is required. 207.176.159.90 07:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] medieval history of purple

The article says "(The working class wore mainly green and brown.)". It's a minor point, but a major misconception that green dye was easy to obtain and thus cheap enough for the working class. Good greens such as Lincoln green were obtained by overdying yellow dye with blue dye (woad/indigo) or vice-versa. Thus such good greens were more expensive than blue, which was in itself one of the more expensive colours, second only to purple and some rich reds. Grey was the medieval term for undyed, which was the cloth most peasants would wear. Next rung of cheapest colours are yellows, of which there are many sources in nature (weld and dyers greenweed were the main commercial ones). Madder red was a bit more expensive, but could probably be afforded by theworking classes for their better tunic, especially washed out reds such as could be obtained from exhausted dye baths. There are some herbs which will produce greenish dye (as opposed to the "good green" I discussed earlier), producing a greenish yellow, brownish green, or grey-green, that would be available to farmwives, but it seems more likely yellows were preferred as they produce clearer colours. Brown is a colour that covered a much wider spectrum of shades in medieval times than now, as far as I can tell. With purple referring only to tyrian purple, other colours, like that obtained by overdying red with blue (which definately happened, especially with woad + logwood or brazilwood), might be referred to as brown, while we would refer to it as purple. So there would be cheap browns - naturally brown coloured wool, and expensive browns, and probably all kinds of expenses in between. So I guess brown isn't an easy thing to say the working class wore either. "The working class wore undyed garments and colours like yellow, orange, pale red." might be better.

There also is medieval dye orchil, which makes a shade of mauve or lilac (and sometimes even magenta). Made from lichen (+ammonia), it is more likely to have been available to farm wives as well as to the rich. But they never would have called it purple, although I do today. It is found a lot in clothing from "viking" Dublin.

I'm sorry I can't provide references for this, it's information garnered from a variety of sources, a bit here, a bit there, and like most medeival studies, is only generalisms, since no one practise was used everywhere.

The concept of when purple became a colour instead of a shade might be worth exploring here too.

[edit] Poem

Is this [1] [2] worth a mention in the literature section? I believe it is a well known poem, though I understand not everything referencing the colour purple need be mentioned. (129.67.62.85 09:31, 23 February 2007 (UTC) User AlmostReadytoFly)

[edit] RGB and HSV

The HSVs are nowhere near what the RGBs land on. Each one is wrong. Why? -lysdexia 23:18, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External Link

Sometimes you vandalism fighters are freaks. I added in an external link to a site wholy relevant to the subject matter and non-commercial. 5 minutes later, gone. Well done you class 1 boiled potatoes. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.232.1.48 (talk • contribs).

You mean the link to purple.com which is a contentless site that is nothing to do with the article at all? Or where you thinking of another external link you added? Gwernol 21:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments. I didn't remove it, but I certainly would have. Why would we want a link to a blank purple page? Why would it be "used by techs to see if internet access is working"? If there is something unique about it, the link commentary needed to say so. Notinasnaid 21:15, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What about the colour Plum and Raisin?

I'm surprised there is no entry of the shade Plum or Raisin under shades of purple and red. Could someone find the right coordinates for those colours and add that into the article? Thanks. 60.50.54.80 07:06, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Content removal?

Referring to this edit

It appears to me that a good part of the removals were trivia and indeed deserved to be removed. However I am concerned that certain areas that might be notable, such as cryptography, food, music as well as military related, have been removed. I realise that by only mentioning these few fields, in fact this entire concern could be labelled WP:ILIKEIT, however I am simply referring to areas where the information was well supported by the actual articles, for example murasaki, Purple Heart and the music references.

Could another editor have a look at the page and figure out if any of those removals should actually be re-included?

Thanks,xC | ☎ 03:58, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

In most cases, what is required is a link on the disambiguation page. Which, you will note, is generally present. Again, what is required is key significance of the color, which isn't present in the links you just provided. --Eyrian 04:39, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inconsistency concerning artist's red-violet, pigment violet, and process magenta

In the section "Historical development of purple," subsection "Artists Pigment Purple (Red-Violet) (web color Medium Violet Red): 1930s", the article says that "artist's red-violet" lies between "pigment violet" and "process magenta." A similar statement appears in the main article on the color red-violet. However, these statements contradict the HSV (and so RGB) values listed in these and other articles: Hue(artist's red-violet)=322°, Hue(pigment violet)=282°, and Hue(process magenta)=320°. It seems to me that the most likely source of the inconsistency is the assertion that the web color red-violet (Hex triplet #C71585) is in fact the same as the color that Munsell color system calls purple (where artists use the word purple the way Munsell does). Can anyone check if web color red-violet on the one hand and Munsell's color purple on the other are, in fact, the same color—or, as I suspect, not? If they are in fact the same, then how should we resolve the inconsistency mentioned above?

Reuqr 02:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

They can't possibly be the same, since Munsell colors are not RGB colors like Web colors are. Like most junk in color articles, this stuff is all unsourced, just somebody's interpretations of what they see. Dicklyon 05:05, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand what you say in your first sentence. As best as I can tell, you may be saying one of two things.
(1) Are you saying that it would be a miracle if the people who were choosing web colors just happened to pick exactly (i.e. to within three significant digits in, say, sRGB space) a color from Munsell's atlas? If this is what you mean, then let me modify my original question: just how far off are Munsell's purple and web red-violet, say in terms of the differences between their HSV (as computed from sRGB) hue degrees and S and V percentages? For example, process magenta's hue (as it is reported in magenta article) is only 2° away from red-violet's.
(2) Or are you saying something more radical: that no web color can even in principle be the same as a Munsell color, because they somehow refer to different things—in other words, because there is a fundamental incomensurability between any CIE-based standard like sRGB on the one hand and the Munsell standard on the other? If that's your statement, then I guess I disagree. After all, as early as 1919 the National Bureau of Standards performed measurements of 15 chips from Munsell's 1915 atlas, and CIE tristimulus values were calculated at a later date. Then in 1926 additional 70 samples were measured, with CIE values computed by 1946. The 1929 Munsell Book of Color and the various subsequent "renotations" were very much studied, and connections to CIE tristimulus values—even under diverse viewing conditions—are known. All this is from Rolf G. Kuehni, Color Space and Its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present (Wiley, Hoboken, N.J., 2003), pp. 274-279. The only way sRGB can fail to describe a Munsell color (to within uncertainties coming from variations of viewing conditions) is if that Munsell color is out of sRGB gamut. On the other hand, I suppose if we are talking about the 1919 atlas, there is also the issue that we would need to interpolate if the color in question is not one of the 85 measured ones.
Note that the issue is not that red-violet's 322° is not strictly within the 282°-320° interval; it would be almost as bad if red-violet's hue were 318°, and so strictly within the interval. The issue is rather that red-violet does not seem to be even close to being in the middle of the interval between pigment violet and process magenta. Reuqr 19:42, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm saying more like the second. You can't say whether a given RGB color is the same as a given Munsell color, without more specific specifications. If the X11 color, rendered according to sRGB spec, is the same chromaticity as the Munsell chip under a D65 illuminant, or something like that, that would be interesting to know, but it seems unlikely. Is there a source? Dicklyon 20:13, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

At the very least, there are many sources that study the reflectance spectra of Munsell chips. One that is in the public domain is at [3]. The server was awfully slow when I tried to access the links with the ASCII data files; I had better luck with [4]; click the squares for reflectance data. This website is cited in, for instance,
Fernando Ayala, José F. Echávarri, Pilar Renet, and Angel I. Negueruela, "Use of three tristimulus values from surface reflectance spectra to calculate the principal components for reconstructing these spectra by using only three eigenvectors," J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 23, 2020-2026 (2006) (abstract: [5]; the article cites the website above as Ref. 24).
One of the classic sources—also cited in the paper above—seems to be
Kenneth L. Kelly, Kasson S. Gibson, and Dorothy Nickerson, "Tristimulus specifications of the Munsell book of color from spectrophotometric measurements," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 33, 355-376 (1943) (abstract: [6]).
The Kuehni book I mentioned above lists a bunch of other sources. You can browse it ("search inside"), if you have an amazon.com account (used at least once to purchase something from amazon.com itself), here: [7].
Incidentally, I now realize that these sources may give enough information to settle the very question I posed. But to really settle it, I would first need the answer to the following: was I wrong in the identification of the Munsell's color in my initial posting? That is,
What is the identity—in the Munsell system—of the Munsell color to which the Wikipedia article is referring? Is it in fact 5RP 5/12?
Having realized my probable mistake above, now I don't understand something else. Look at this statement in the article:
…professional artists, following Munsell color system… regard purple as being synonymous with the red-violet color shown at right, in order to clearly distinguish purple from violet…
In what sense are artists supposed to be "following Munsell" here? Obviously not in nomenclature. Is it the case that the artists do use Munsell's colors in their work, but change the names (e.g. Munsell's purple → artist's violet, and Munsell's red-purple → artist's purple)? I'd rewrite this if I understood what is attempted to be said here.
Reuqr 04:52, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Offensive and false.

"Psychology The term porphyrophobia means an irrational fear of the color purple."

I find that offensive, my fear is not "irrational" infact, I say anybody who is not frightened by purple is mindless and insane. Purple is responsible for all car accidents and stangulations. Also is it mere coincidence violet become "Violent" with a simple "n" added? No. Find a violent TV scene with no purple in the background. You can't. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.157.69.190 (talk) 15:44, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why is this article so long?

there are even sections on video games and psychedellic drugs...... is this how it is in other articles about colours? AbsoluteZero255 03:55, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Pretty much so. Feel free to remove anything that's unsourced. Dicklyon 04:05, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your advice. I removed some non-important sections AbsoluteZero255 04:13, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shades of Purple

When you think purple, is it lavender or violet? dark or light? the range of this color is highly large and you should make sure you are positive about the type of purple you want. The same goes for all colors. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.50.246.115 (talk) 16:03, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Homosexuality

It surprises me that homosexuality is not one of the words in the top info box under the "Commonly Represents" section. This was actually the first and most strongest representation of purple that came to mind upon entering the page. Davey5505 (talk) 08:37, 31 May 2008 (UTC)