Ancient Greeks had no single word for the color blue.

World History

W hile it's sometimes said that people in ancient Greece couldn't see the color blue, they definitely could — assuming normal vision, of course. Their eyes worked as well as ours, and they knew how to dye and paint with blue pigments. Still, there was no single Greek word that neatly captured the hue of the sky, the sea, sapphire, and blueberries all at once. But if you think about it, that's less strange than it might sound.

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By the Numbers

Age (in years) of the world's oldest indigo-dyed fabric

6,000

Centuries when blue became fashionable in Europe

12th-14th

Did you know?

English had no word for the color orange until the 16th century.

For most of history, the color orange didn't have its own name in English. Before the 16th century, English speakers typically described the hue as "yellow-red" or simply "red." The word "orange" originally referred only to the fruit, and its linguistic journey began with the Sanskrit nāraṅga, the name for the orange tree. As the fruit spread west through trade, the word became the Arabic nāranj and eventually entered European languages. English lost the initial "n" through a linguistic shift called metanalysis, in which sounds migrate between words — the same process that turned "a napron" into "an apron" and a nuncle" into "an uncle." By the 1300s, "orange" was widely used across Europe to name the fruit. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, English speakers didn't begin using it to describe the color until the 1500s, often in reference to fabrics and clothing. Before that, the color existed as a unique hue — but it didn't have a name of its own.