Pink was not pink, the colour as we know it. Cultural change.

April 18, 2020 Ben Yeoh

Pink was not the colour pink
Cultural Change in Taiwan

I was reminded that pink was not the pink we know:

Look up the word pink in the dictionary, and you’ll probably find a lot more definitions than you might have expected.

As well as being the name of a pale red color, a pink can be a small flat-bottomed sailing vessel, a juvenile salmon, a chaffinch, a decorative hole or eyelet, a stab with a dagger, a foppish dandy, a tiny fragment, and (thanks to Chicago’s Pinkerton detective agency) a private eye. Besides that, as a verb pink can be used to mean “to narrow” (especially the eyes), “to wink or blink,” “to make a metallic rattling noise,” “to apply rouge,” and “to attach or cut a decorative trim” (which is why scissors with jagged blades are called pinking shears).

But of all the word’s meanings, the oldest on record is one that appears in only the most comprehensive dictionaries: pink used to be yellow. Or rather, pink used to be the name of a murky yellow-green color—or, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains it: "A yellowish or greenish-yellow lake pigment made by combining a vegetable colouring matter with a white base, such as a metallic oxide."

A “lake” pigment like this is an organic dye or artist’s pigment made insoluble by combining the organic material required with a metallic compound. (In this context, lake has nothing to do with bodies of water, but instead comes from lac, a dark red resinous substance produced by certain trees.) It just so happens that the pigment the name pink was originally attached to was made from vegetable matter that created a murky greenish-yellow tinge.

In this sense, the word pink dates back to the early 1400s at least, and in fact, it wasn’t until the mid-17th century that pink came to refer to the pale reddish color it does today. But why the change in meaning? And why, for that matter, name either color pink at all?