The folks at Dolores Labs used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have folks identify a series of random colors. Then they made a color wheel with the data. It's fun to see the adjectives and odd names people came up with for certain colors. From a post by Brendan O'Connor who made the experiment, titled "Where Does 'Blue' End And 'Red' Begin?":
This study is basically the same design as the famous World Color Survey, where anthropologists showed color patches to speakers of many different languages and asked for names. Of course, we only have English speakers (most Turkers live in the U.S.). However, we can get much more data. (The… picture and links use only a small percentage of all the colors and names we collected.) There's tons more that can be done. Want to make a better visualizer? Statistical analysis of colors to name terms? Let us know and we should be able to get this data set online.
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