The Many Languages, Many Colors Project

Does everyone think about color the same way? Are there color names that can't be translated between languages?

Purpose

Different languages divide the color spectrum in different ways, which has been shown to influence how people perceive color. The Many Languages, Many Colors project is an attempt to measure these differences by collecting data and creating color models, and then share the results through visualizations and publicly released data sets. But first...

Take the Survey!

Survey is currently down and will hopefully be online again soon.

Visualizations

We have created a number of different visualizations to share our results:

Color Translator

Find translations and synonyms for colors in multiple languages. Compare the ranges of colors for different color names.

Hue Color Comparisons

Compare the terms used to divide the hue colors (the brightest, most saturated colors: ).

Full Color Maps

Compare how languages divide the full color space.

Korean-English Translation Comparison

Compare online color translations to our suggested translations.

Korean-English Viridis Color Spectrum

Compare how Korean and English color names differ on the Viridis color spectrum ( ) that is sometimes used in visualizations.

Summary Blog Posts

Read our blog posts that summarize our results:

There is No "Blue" in Korean: Different Languages Have Different Colors

Dataset

We have made our dataset, models, and visualizations freely available for download (both the 2019 EuroVis publication version and later updates). We plan on continuing to update this dataset as we collect more data.

Publication

Peer Reviewed Academic Paper: Color Names Across Languages: Salient Colors and Term Translation in Multilingual Color Naming Models

Note: We made a minor calculation error on one graph in the paper, you can see the corrected version of the graph here.

Data Status:

Last Raw Data download: September 9, 2025

Last Data Processing Update: September 26, 2025

Note: This site has up-to-date visualizations, you can see the old 2019 EuroVis publication visualizations are here.