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Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology pp 1265–1271Cite as

World Color Survey

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Definition

The World Color Survey collected comprehensive color-naming data from an average of 24 speakers of each of 110 unwritten languages from around the world. Analysis of these data has resulted in a number of research publications. The data are available at http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/data.html.

Introduction

The World Color Survey (WCS) was undertaken to investigate the main findings of Berlin and Kay (B&K) [1]. These were (A) that there exist universal crosslinguistic constraints on color naming and (B) that basic color terminology systems tend to develop in a partially fixed order. To this end, the WCS collected color-naming data from speakers of 110 unwritten languages. The WCS data are available in the WCS Data Archive. This entry reviews the history of the WCS, including the creation of the online data archive, and describes some recent uses of the archive to investigate constraints on color naming across languages.

The WCS: History and Methodology

The WCS was begun...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94704, USA

    Paul Kay & Richard S. Cook

Authors
  1. Paul Kay
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  2. Richard S. Cook
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Kay .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Modern, Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  2. School of Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  3. Graduate Institute of Colour and Illumination, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

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Kay, P., Cook, R.S. (2016). World Color Survey. In: Luo, M.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8071-7_113

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