[sudobash1]

As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.

I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.

I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.

As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.

[harrall]

People are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking.

The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.

People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

That’s way more interesting.

[throwup238]

> The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.

Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.

* black crush I think its called

[dotancohen]

I'd love to see a photograph of a 32 bit greyscale gradient on both. I wonder if some monitors with similar issues would not be able to represent the photograph properly.

[sfupysbsu]

Haha I think that hue test needs some help though:

“ Best Score for your Gender -2147483648 Worst Score for your Gender 2147483647”

[ajuc]

Also f.lux and other software that changes color temperatures depending on time of day :)

[kakacik]

People are not freaking out just pointing out stupidity of such test with 2 options only, no need for hyperbole.

[dotancohen]

By what method would you suggest calibrating one's monitor? I use Debian Linux if that's a factor.

[harrall]

You can do it on Linux but you need to buy a device you attach to your monitor. I have a Spyder X Pro but there are others.

It’s like $200 and it’s not worth it unless you do color sensitive work (photo editing, printing or video editing) and you have an expensive monitor or expensive laptop with good color support. Many monitors will fail so badly the calibration won’t be able to fix it.

But if you’ve ever had a lot of trouble trying to get colors to match when printing or between devices, it could be a godsend, although it’s only one of the many reasons colors might not match.

[dotancohen]

Thank you.

I wonder if photo stores might have the device, and if they would loan it. I'm surprised there is no method of calibration against common objects of known colour, such as Euro bills.

[Melatonic]

If you use the proper profile for your monitor and set the monitor to a profile that's relatively accurate it should be decent

[dotancohen]

Thank you. I'll research that.

[vigilantpuma]

This test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English.

Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.

Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?

The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.

[jounker]

The person you were responding to said that cyan feels like a completely different color to them, neither green nor blue. I had the same reaction when it gave me a color that I immediately identified as teal, and I learned my colors as a monolingual english speaker in Ohio. Therefore the supposition that all English speakers see only blue or green is an oversimplification.

[vigilantpuma]

I didn't say that English speakers only see blue or green. I said that those are the two basic color terms that cyan is in between, and cyan isn't a basic color term and thus collapses to one or the other if categorized under basic color terms. Same goes for teal.

[mathw]

And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

[vigilantpuma]

With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%...

[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...

[djaro]

But its frequency still rose by over 300x since the start of the chart, which might suggest that for some people it is a basic color term.

"English" isn't one monolith. Every English speaker speaks their own version, some closer to each other than others, and new features are constantly being added or removed.

[vigilantpuma]

The further you have to narrow down the set of speakers for whom it's a basic color term, the less of a basic color term it is for English as a whole. We don't have to have this argument about e.g. orange.

[kogold]

Thanks, this seemed obvious to me too. But I would add, this could apply to orange too - there are a lot of orange tones between yellow and red, and if you likewise wanted to determine your subjective boundary, which this is only about, you would be able to say "rather red for me" or "rather yellow for me", regardless of the intermediate color. Since the space of colors can be described as convex, so to speak, you can between every two arbitrary colors determine your subjective decision boundary, regardless of any color in between. The premise is just accepting to ignore those colors.

[something765478]

I'm a Russian speaker, but I've never thought of goluboy and siniy as separate colors, unlike blue and green. To me, goluboy and siniy are like pink and red; just different shades of the same color.

[juliansark]

You blew my mind with "pink and red being different shades of the same color".

p.s. I am color vision handicapped or whatever that is called.

[thaumasiotes]

> You blew my mind with "pink and red being different shades of the same color".

This is also how native English speakers (with color vision) view pink and red. Compare the classic dialogue from Red vs Blue ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCwYfSeqAw8#t=47 ):

Look at it! It's not pink! It's like a... a lightish red.

Guess what. They already have a color for lightish red. You know what it's called? PINK.

[vigilantpuma]

Pink and red are also separate basic color terms in English!

[orloffm]

Yes, the middle color there on the results page is clearly "goluboy" to me, so I my line is at ~33%, in the middle between green and goluboy.

[suslik]

> Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.

I don't know. I am a russian speaker and for me light blue (goluboy) is simply a type of blue.

[adrian_b]

While "orange" did not exist as a single word in most languages, already in Old English or even in Latin or Ancient Greek one could find mentions about things that were "red-yellow".

Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".

For instance it was frequent to say that some things were "of the color of fire". Most likely this was intended to say that they were orange. For red objects one would have said "of the color of blood", while for yellow objects one would have said "of the color of sulfur" or "of the color of gold". "Of the color of saffron" is also likely to have meant "orange", though saffron may have many hues, from reddish to yellowish, depending on how it is prepared.

[carlosjobim]

> Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".

Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".

[thaumasiotes]

> Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".

Well, it's true that that's how we got the color term "orange".

It's not true that words that refer specifically to a color, as opposed to metaphorically referring to the color of the noun that is the primary meaning of the word, are rare. They're not rare in modern languages, and they also aren't rare in ancient languages. Your parent comment is mistaken.

Compare e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... [only meaning: "red"], but note that this is normal.

[cestith]

Apparently the color name did come from the fruit, and therefore didn’t enter common use in English until around the 16th century.

[scoofy]

I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.

[echelon]

Philosophically speaking, does each of us experience "520 nm green" the same way?

Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?

Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?

[altairprime]

My left and right eyes are shifted +cyan and +magenta respectively, so, no, definitely not — but hooray for the resulting semi-tetrachromacy :D

[hellojimbo]

For different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different

[diwank]

this is actually a surprisingly rich area of debate in philosophy of mind. see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

[scoofy]

Consciousness and qualia are a mystery.

I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.

[freehorse]

There is a cognitive science research group in japan that looks into this kind of problems [0]. They made a similarity judgement task, and construct embendings using it, which is basically a similarity structure in some vector space.

[0] Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40124475/

[djaro]

This still can't show that my red is your red, only that my red is on the same position of my color wheel as your red is on yours

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>the same g-protein coupled b

If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?

[gora_mohanty]

> If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?

That path leads down to solipsism which is not very intersting

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I was talking about something a little more empirical. Like, literally, does my g-protein consist of exactly the same amino acids chained together in the same sequence, and folded identically? Some minor mutations don't always make the protein non-functional, not all would result in color-blindness. I thought this was the basis for tetrachromats anyway, just with a different protein (and a more significant mutation).

Same with "firmware". If our brains process the data differently, then our actual perception might vary in (eventually, I would hope) real-world measurable ways.

[jibal]

define "experience the same way"

There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.

[adrian_b]

The current use of "cyan" for blue-green is a modern confusion caused by people who have used Greek words without bothering to check their true meaning.

In Ancient Greek, "cyan" was blue, not blue-green. More precisely, it was the color of the pigment "ultramarine blue", which has remained widely used until today. The name of this pigment was already used by the Hittites, long before the Greeks.

An example of a Latin author who distinguished consistently green, blue-green and blue in many places is Pliny the Elder.

Blue was referred to as the color of the sky or the color of the blue pigments used in painting, like ultramarine blue.

Green was referred to as "green like grass", "green like tree leaves" or "green like emeralds".

Blue-green was referred to as "green like the littoral sea", "green like turquoise" or "green like beryls".

This is especially obvious in the discussion about emeralds and beryls, which are identical but for their color, the former being green and the latter blue-green.

Similarly, in Latin "red" was used for both red and purple, but the two colors were distinguished as "red like crimson dye" (beetle-based dye) and "red like purple dye" (snail-based dye).

[munificent]

> current use of "cyan" for blue-green is a modern confusion caused by people who have used Greek words without bothering to check their true meaning.

This is a misunderstanding of how language works. Words don't have any "true" meaning. A word exists to convey an idea from a speaker to a listener. If at that moment the intended meaning is conveyed, that is the word's true meaning at that point in time.

When I say "cyan" and a listener pictures a light color whose hue is around 180° similar to the sky on a clear day, then neither one of us is confused and the correct information has been transmitted from one brain to another.

Whether some long-dead Greeks would have used that same blob of phonemes to convey a different spectral idea is irrelevant. When you said "turquoise", but did you mean to convey "from Turkey"? When you said "beetle", did you mean to convey "little biter" or an insect? Probably not.

[moritzwarhier]

I found this an interesting "actually...", not sure why you're being downvoted.

Ofc the modern usage is not necessarily a "confusion" because of an older meaning, maybe that's bothering people, but I read it as tongue-in-cheek.

I prefer "turquoise" anyway, which is more common in German for blue-greenish colors.

[adrian_b]

There is no doubt that confusions are the origin of these English words.

It is extremely unlikely that any of those who introduced these words in English chose intentionally to use them for other things than for what they had been used for millennia.

For a modern user, it is no longer a confusion to use such words in their currently widespread sense. When speaking to others, I also use such words with their current meaning, in order to be understood.

Nevertheless, it is good to know their original meanings, especially when reading older texts, which may use those meanings. I have seen a lot of ridiculous claims about texts written in the Antiquity, or even about some texts written a couple of centuries ago, where those who had read those texts had been mislead by believing that the words had the same meaning as in modern English.

Especially about the colors known by ancient people, e.g about the Ancient Greeks, there have been many fantastic theories, e.g. that the Ancient Greeks did not know blue or brown, when already in the Iliad of Homer there are a lot of instances of words meaning "blue" (= "the color of the ultramarine blue pigment") or "brown" (= "the color of burnt wood").

[moritzwarhier]

Fair!

Thanks for elaborating. So not tongue-in-cheek at all.

[adrian_b]

Someone has downvoted this, despite the fact that what I have written is not an opinion, but just facts.

Because I have seen on HN extremely frequently downvotes that just show that the downvoters are ignorant about what they downvote. I stopped a long time ago to downvote comments.

Now I either upvote when I agree and otherwise I write a comment explaining why I disagree.

It would have been better if others had followed such a policy.

Perhaps the downvoter had something to say about "cyan", but this is indeed only one example of a long list of Ancient Greek words that have been borrowed into English during the 19th and 20th century, but which are used with incorrect meanings. Most likely this is due to the fact that those who have introduced these words did not study the Ancient Greek language and they also did not consult anyone knowledgeable or any good dictionaries. Another example of this kind is "macro" used as an opposite for "micro", i.e. as "big", while the true opposite of "micro" is "mega" = "big", while "macro" means "long", the opposite of "short" ("brachy" in Ancient Greek).

[watwut]

It is not an incorrect meaning, it is that meaning of the word in English is different. What it meant in ancient Greek or in 1805 is not relevant to what it means today.

Words meanings shift over time in all languages. And when languages take sounds from other languages, they also regularly shift their meanings.

[carlosjobim]

No, there's an original and correct meaning. Just because a majority might be wrong, doesn't make them right.

[compiler-guy]

Language evolves. Historical meaning can inform our understanding of modern usage but doesn’t dictate or govern it.

Linguists call this “semantic drift” and it occurs in every language we know of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

Wikipedias first English example is:

Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad".

[jerf]

Possibly even more directly, the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy

[carlosjobim]

Just because we can - and should - understand what people mean when they use words wrongly, doesn't mean that words don't have correct meanings. That makes the world poorer, for no benefit at all.

[Suppafly]

>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.

This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.

[guidopallemans]

> most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green

For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

[Suppafly]

>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!

That's sorta not true, it's just a quirk of language development. If they only have one word that covers both, they use additional words to describe the actual shade they're talking about.

[ralferoo]

Of these, the only language that I know a bit about, in Chinese 青 (blue/green) is the older word and nowadays used less than the more modern 蓝 (blue) and 绿 (green), but actually 青 is still used a lot in specific phrases, and I prefer to think of it as the "colour of things in nature" - so a blue sky would be 青, a blue/green sea would be 青 and a field of lush grass would also be 青. That aspect also comes through in how it's used metaphorically, in the senses of youth or vitality.

This is the same character that's used for Japanese traffic lights when foreigners find it funny that they call obviously green lights "blue".

[StilesCrisis]

Fun fact: Japan's traffic lights actually do use a blue-green color; it's not the same green that most countries use. ("In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature.")

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li...

[ralferoo]

The latter tests were all a bit pointless because they were just turquoise, and all looked much the same - a mix of blue and green, so I was pretty much answering based on whether it was bluer or greener than the previous image.

The results said "Your boundary is at hue 179, bluer than 82% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." and definitely if I was judging the boundary on a gradient, I'd have placed the line a bit further to the right.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, the structure of the test is designed to produce a fake result based on a spurious premise.

It wants to do a binary search in the color space to find "The Boundary" between your personal concept of green and your personal concept of blue.

No such boundary exists. If you abandon the idea of binary search and just present a bunch of similar colors in no particular order, you'll get more realistic results, which look like "you called color x 'blue' x% of the time, and 'green' (1-x)% of the time". You could even display a grayscale histogram of the blue-green continuum according to the odds of any particular point on it being labeled "blue" or "green". That would be fun.

[D-Machine]

Yes, very annoying, we know from extensive work in psychometrics that single-item, binary / forced-choice items produce junk responses that are heavily contaminated with response styles (answer in most socially-desirable way, select closest response to mouse/finger, select same response as last time, select random response, etc). Just give people an out ("Diagree with the question / premises", "Prefer not to answer", "Unsure / Can't decide", etc) and make sure you have e.g. a 5-7 point Likert-type scale for multiple items, or up to an 11-point scale for single items.

This kind of site / demo does none of the above, and so can't even be trusted for directional effects (the direction of response may simple be due to the type of people responding, etc).

[ecshafer]

My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.

[gdwatson]

> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.

You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .

[coffeeling]

The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks.

(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)

[noahchen]

For subtractive colors (dyes) you're right. For additive (light), green and blue make cyan (Hex: #00FFFF)

[excalibur]

> When we want violet, we know just what to do. Just mix our good friends purple and blue.

I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.

[red369]

I agreed with you, and then went to the Wikipedia pages for both. I might have changed my mind now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)

[adornKey]

I think using violet as a name for the entire color-range around (~128, 0, 255) is also common. So in a sense purple is an element of the violet color-range. But as points they are distinct. I think purple is more specific - as a color-range it'd cover less area.

[adornKey]

Purple has a lot more red. (157, 0, 255) vs. (128, 0, 255). Good to have learned something today...

[cpburns2009]

I think of purple as encompassing both indigo (blueish purple) and violet (pinkish purple).

[Suppafly]

I only know chartreuse from fishing lures.

[natebc]

Same.

Dad: Hey, what rig did we catch that king on?

Me: Live pogey with a chartreuse minnow.

[refactor_master]

I only know chartreuse from the liquor.

I thought it was green though.

[tmtvl]

There is yellow Chartreuse as well. I seem to recall preferring the yellow, though it's been over a decade, so I can't remember how either one tastes.

[MichaelDickens]

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.

[coffeeling]

Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.

[red75prime]

BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.

[argee]

You might like this then. [0]

[0] https://dynomight.net/colors/#2

[sebastiennight]

That went from a fun, interesting experience, to wondering if this is how SCP 3125 was going to get me, as the entire screen seemed to become a wild glowing green long after the animation likely ended.

వ

[orthoxerox]

It's always great to experience completely new qualia.

[diwank]

and device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently

[seba_dos1]

Yes, for me cyan is firmly a shade of blue, and turquoise is a blue color that's somewhat greenish.

[gcanyon]

funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.

[Insanity]

Same for me, I classify it as blue.

[wodenokoto]

The whole point is to measure where you draw the line between blue and green, which is going to be in turquoise territory.

When you finish the test it even tells you if you consider turquoise blue or green.

[D-Machine]

Except you can reject the very (stupid) question / framing, in which case, the response is to either close the tab, or respond in a particular response style, neither of which makes the data more informative. This kind of clumsy stuff is just dumb with what we know now, edutainment distraction for the HN crowd.

[koliber]

There was a time when there were no separate names for blue and green in the Japanese language. Some languages right now have concepts of fundamental colors like navy blue and light blue, where English rolls it into a single "blue". Naming colors is highly cultural and changes over time. The idea that colors have boundaries is fascinating from both psychological as well as linguistic perspectives.

The framing seems stupid if you take the naive perspective that your language's way of dividing colors is the only valid one. Exercises like this and discussions that follow help expand perspectives.

[ImprovedSilence]

I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.

[somenameforme]

That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.

[1] - https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer

[vigilantpuma]

Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.

[saghm]

I had a similar reaction at first, but I also realized that the point isn't to literally say "if someone asked what color this was, I would say blue or green" but "do I consider this 'more blue than green' or 'more green than blue'". With the idea of color as a spectrum rather than a discrete set of values, it's reasonable to ask whether a given shade falls closer what you'd consider one value or another. Even though I don't consider cyan to "be" blue, I do consider it closer to blue than green, in the same way that I consider magenta to be closer to red than blue. This is entirely subjective though, and at least personally I find it fun to see the variety of perceptions people have!

[RobotToaster]

It does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"

[olpad]

Red vs orange vs yellow is not the same as green vs cyan vs blue though. Red and orange and yellow are the same distance on the color wheel as green and blue and purple, so you could do this same thing with red/red-orange/orange or the orange to yellow spectrum exclusively.

[biztos]

I have no idea when the words entered the languages, but I find it quite interesting that the color Orange in Thai is literally the color of the fruit (สีส้ม) whereas in Hungarian it is the same fruit as a shade of yellow (narancssárga).

[crazygringo]

Came here to say the same thing.

Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.

But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.

And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.

[sureMan6]

That's very funny to have my exact reaction present in the first comment, I was thinking "that's turquoise" but I do also feel like turquoise is green, like you'd call the Copenhagen copper domes green, and the word verdigris comes from green

[Abimelex]

There are no "cyan-receptors" on your retina so it's not a cultural thing, it's a bio-physics one. Plus as many mentioned the calibration of you display has propably a way higher impact on this than anything else.

So don't be upset, it's just for fun :)

[driverdan]

Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.

[pharrington]

This makes me realize that one of my formative childhood experiences was seeing the Crayola 64 crayon pack and thinking "huh, I guess there is NO limit."

[tshaddox]

I’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and green.

Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.

[stainablesteel]

it's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward

[moate]

Ambiguity scaring the shit out of engineers is giving me life on this blah of a Monday.

[Melatonic]

Pink isn't real

[carlosjobim]

> As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.

Just as all other modern schooling, the teaching of colors is done deliberately order to dumb down children and starve them from their natural ability to learn.

A child will learn at least dozens, if not hundreds of colors, if they are allowed to and taught. This has a real impact, because unless you learn this, it can be very difficult as an adult to be able to actually see the difference between colors.

But instead idiots make toys with only simple prime colors, and even playgrounds. Even though children themselves prefer more diverse and interesting color schemes.

Although after a few dozen color names, I think children are more benefitted by learning more about color theory such as physical paint mixing, digital mixing like RGB and HSL, and physical light effects on colours.

[moate]

It's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.

[jibal]

But color isn't a spectrum of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/

[FabHK]

Just because it is 2D doesn't mean it's not a spectrum.

[s0rce]

This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.

[Lerc]

It's a false dichrotamy.

[frisia]

the question is if you think this shade of cyan is more green than blue

[croisillon]

let's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow

[red369]

Orange is bright brown!

By the way, my comment is entirely in jest.

I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.

But the YCombinator logo? Yellowish red?

[croisillon]

i agree with bright brown!

[wwn_se]

orange is a subset of brown.

[FrustratedMonky]

This is the point, isn't it?

Why does 'turquoise' or 'orange' being labeled as a distinct colors, mean that they are not on the scale between two other colors?

[irishcoffee]

Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.

Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.