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Colour Studies: A broad spectrum
Edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough and Christian Kay
[Not in series 191] 2014
► pp. 126–139

The spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English

ORCID logo | University of Glasgow, UK
| University of Glasgow, UK

The basic colour category red and its exponents occupies an important place in the development of colour vocabulary, whether in the evolution of colour perception, infant language learning, or the history of particular languages. This chapter focuses on the development of the red category in English using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English, which lists synonyms from the earliest English records until the present day. Comparison with other English BCCs shows that red has by far the largest number of exponents over history and the steepest increase in lexis in the modern period. The close relationship of red and pink, the youngest of the English BCCs, is also explored.

Published online: 26 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.191.08ale
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Mylonas, Dimitris, Serge Caparos & Jules Davidoff
2022. Augmenting a colour lexicon. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9:1 DOI logo

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