This week, I wrote about how Greek and Russian speakers process blue differently than English speakers do, because their languages carve it into two colours. But English has its own version of this story.

Old English colour words are genuinely strange. First, there were only six basic colour terms, and they each covered a lot of the colour space. The word brūn, the ancestor of “brown,” could mean brown, purple, dark red, or even the gleam of a polished sword. And “blue” was barely in the picture.

The whole system seems to have been built around brightness rather than hue. So how did the modern system evolve? How did English go from six basic colours to the eleven we have today?