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Colors are such fundamental tangible things that it's hard to imagine not having names

for them.

But the number of words for colors varies widely by language, and for many, many years

English got by without a lot of the color names we take for granted today.

In nearly all languages, the first colors to get names are black and white.

Black comes from very old words that meant to burn or burned.

But the same old words also gave us Blake, which is a now obscure word that meant pale,

pallid, and ashen.

In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says it's often difficult to tell which of these

two colors is meant in Old English texts when the context doesn't make it clear.

And to make it even more complicated at some point, black could also be used to describe

something bright, shining, or glittering, perhaps related to the idea that something

that's burning is all those things.

So it took black a while to be limited to what we think of as black today.

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