We've spent a great deal of energy trying to understand what is meant by colour names and, generally, although agreement in many areas is clear, there is a great deal of room for interpretation. To help a bit in a more universal understanding, here are the accepted terms of colour, based on our understanding of light refraction. This is all a bit dry, but it represents the basic foundations of colour theory. Delete now and accept my apologies, if this will bore you. PRIMARIES: Red, Blue, Yellow SECONDARIES: Violet, Green, Orange TERTIARIES: Red-Violet, Red-Orange, Orange-Yellow, Yellow-Green, Blue-Green, Blue-Violet You will notice that purple is not among these colours. Also, fanciful names are missing, as they are too subjective. If one was to place these colour in a wheel, one would recognise the constituents of the prismatic rainbow. Our eyes do not register wavelengths lower than Violet or higher than Red, which represent the two extremes of human vison. Our vision peaks around yellow-green, which appears very bright to our senses. In colour practice, you have tone, hue and chroma, which refer to adding white, adding black and lastly intensity. White is technically the total absence of colour, while black is the total presence of colour. We refer to grey as the additive for creating hues, not black. You know the saying, all practice is grey! In the natural world, we never see pure base colours, except through light refraction. This is part of the reason why we have all of these fun names for various hues and tones of colour. They always have a white or grey component, often both, which takes them away from the pure mother colours. Purple is a greyed blue-violet. Add white and you have lavender. Ben's pondering on pink is an important area. As Jim pointed out, pink is not just white and red. It is this and much more. Our eyes are not sensitive enough to see all the subtle changes in the red spectrum, especially as it pales with white. The blue or orange (yellow) component are very difficult to discern, unless we place the tones next to each other. From my own experience, we can learn to see these tones, but we tend to want to gloss over them. With greens to yellows to oranges, we seem to recognise a much wider range, which would be logical, as our vision is particularly sensitive in these wavelengths. I hope this hasn't bored you too much, it just seemed important to know where we are coming from in colour. Even with these principle, it is very subjective as to where one colour starts and stops. Jamie V. Cologne