Colour associations

In the Navajo four-directions colour system, black is the colour of the north, associated with Big Sheep Mountain (Dibé Nitsaa) and with Black God (Haashchʼééshzhiní), the god of fire.

In 19th-century Victorian Britain black was the prescribed mourning colour, most strictly for widows, who wore heavy black crêpe 'widow's weeds' for up to two years.

Black was the colour of Italian Fascist paramilitary uniform — the Blackshirts (‘Camicie Nere’) — a party colour subsequently imitated by other fascist movements.

In the Western Christian liturgical calendar, black is used for All Souls' Day and for funerals, Requiem Masses and Offices for the Dead.

The black flag is the central symbol of anarchism, signifying the negation of the state and of national flags, plus mourning and hunger for past workers' revolts.

In the Western moral colour axis black signifies evil, sin, death and the devil; in medieval Christianity black was called 'the color of death and sin' (Bernard of Clairvaux) against white's 'purity, innocence and all the virtues'.

Black is the traditional mourning colour of Western/Christian European cultures, worn in ordinary dress at funerals and used in liturgical vestments for the dead.

In Maya cosmology the Bacab Ho' Chan Ek, holding up the west, is black.

In the Chinese Five Elements system, black (hēi, dark xuán) is the colour of the Water element, corresponding to the direction north and the season winter.

Black-and-white (horizontally striped) prison uniforms served as a visible badge of shame identifying convicts; they were abolished in some US jurisdictions around 1904 because the stripes were judged humiliating.

Black-and-yellow diagonal striping marks the location of a physical hazard, and black (or magenta) on yellow is used for the biohazard and ionizing-radiation symbols.

In European politics blue is the colour of conservatism / centre-right (as red is the colour of the left) — the usage that NBC invoked when it first coded US Republicans blue.

Blue (azure) was the colour of the French royal arms - gold fleurs-de-lis on a blue field - making blue the heraldic colour of French kingship.

The same hue carried opposite class meanings by pigment cost: ultramarine (lapis lazuli) was the most expensive pigment and blue became the royal colour of France (12th c.), while cheap indigo/woad dyed the clothes of common people.

Modern uniformed police in Britain adopted dark blue uniforms to distinguish themselves from the red-coated military, reinforcing that police were civilian rather than military enforcers.

In the US, blue denotes the Democratic Party / left-leaning states ('blue states'), fixed since 2000 — opposite to the European use of blue for conservatism.

In English, blue marks manual and trade work: 'blue-collar' workers, so called because industrial workers wore blue denim or chambray shirts, coveralls and boilersuits, whose dark shade concealed dirt and grease.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Five Buddha Families mandala, blue is the colour of the Vajra family headed by Akṣobhya, placed in the east, with the element water.

In the Navajo four-directions colour system, blue is the colour of the south, associated with Turquoise Mountain (Tsoodził).

The Virgin Mary is traditionally portrayed in blue; 'Marian blue' is a tone of ultramarine named for its use with Mary, and ultramarine made from lapis lazuli — more expensive than gold — was reserved for the robes of Christ and the Virgin as an expression of devotion.

The Olympic rings' five colours (blue, yellow, black, green, red on white), chosen by Pierre de Coubertin in 1913, were meant so that, with the white ground, they reproduced the colours of every competing nation's flag; a later continent-per-ring mapping (1949-50) was officially retracted in 1951.

Gold signifies wealth and value across many traditions, a meaning that descends from the metal's material scarcity and durability (store of wealth) rather than from the hue as such.

Gold is a Chinese wedding colour, paired with red: bridal gowns are embroidered with gold and made with gold metal thread, and gold reads as the traditional counterpart to Western white.

In the British Army, officers' rank distinctions were worn in metallic gold: epaulettes of regular infantry and Foot Guards regiments were gold (silver in other regiments), and rank was graded by the amount of gold bullion lace.

In English, 'green about/around the gills' idiomatically means looking ill or unwell, especially nauseated.

Green became the colour of environmentalism in the late 20th century, and commerce followed by labelling products 'green'; 'greenwashing' documents the commercial misuse of green colours and nature imagery to appear environmentally friendly.

Green is the mandated colour for a safe condition, emergency escape/first-aid, and for 'proceed/go' in road and rail signalling.

Green is the colour of Paradise in the Quran, where the righteous wear green garments of fine silk; Islamic tradition also associates green with the Prophet Muhammad, who is reported to have worn green garments.

Green, as the colour of Islam, carries the auspicious fortune-giving function that red carries for the Chinese: Malay Muslims give Raya money (duit raya) in green envelopes during Hari Raya Aidilfitri.

In the Western Christian liturgical calendar, green is the colour of Ordinary Time — the long seasonal period outside Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.

Green is the colour of environmentalism and the Green parties, a usage coined with the West German party die Grünen in the late 1970s.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Five Buddha Families mandala, green is the colour of the Karma family headed by Amoghasiddhi, placed in the north, with the element wind (air).

Since the 1970s green has signalled environmental friendliness in Western politics and, by extension, naturalness/health in product and organic-food branding.

In Western surgery green (and blue) scrubs and drapes are chosen for functional optical reasons - contrast with red blood, reduced eye fatigue and suppression of afterimages - replacing white; the meaning is physiological, not a symbolic 'green = health' claim.

In the Chinese Five Elements (wuxing) system, qīng (green/azure) is the colour of the Wood element, which corresponds to the direction east and the season spring.

In Victorian England, grey was a mourning colour permitted in the 'half mourning' stage and in general funeral dress alongside black.

Indigo was historically the cheap, plentiful, colorfast blue dye of working and common dress: it was one of the few dyes that binds to cotton, so it dyed denim, jeans, and commoners' clothing blue.

Khaki was introduced in British colonial India (Corps of Guides, khaki uniform by 1848) and spread as a field uniform because the dust-coloured cloth provided camouflage, replacing the impractical bright red coat.

In Japanese kimono practice, colours (like motifs) are matched to the season: darker, more rustic colours are favoured in cooler months, and vibrant colours with floral designs in spring and summer; autumn favours warmer, darker colours.

Tiffany & Co.'s robin's-egg blue is a documented, legally protected brand colour: used on the Blue Book since 1845 and registered as a colour trademark since 1998, produced as a custom Pantone colour (1837, the company's founding year).

The kāṣāya robe, dyed brown or saffron ochre, is the robe of fully ordained Buddhist monks and nuns and is the visible mark of monastic renunciation.

Orange is the Dutch dynastic and national-political colour, standing for the House of Orange (William the Silent) and the royal family.

Orange was the signifying colour of Viktor Yushchenko's 2004 presidential campaign, giving its name to the 'Orange Revolution' and to his political camp ('the Oranges').

In the modern US/West, pink marks babies as girls and blue marks babies as boys — a gender-coding of infant clothing that dress historians date only to the 20th century.

Pink is the girls' colour in the US today, but in c. 1918 the same country's trade press held the reverse — pink for boys (as the weak form of 'decided, stronger' red) and blue for girls — the famous 20th-century pink/blue reversal.

In US politics purple denotes a mixed or centrist electorate — swing 'purple states' and 'Purple America', the visual red-plus-blue blend of the national map.

In Victorian England, purple (with lilac and mauve) was a mourning colour admitted in the 'half mourning' stage after the strict black of deep mourning.

Under Japan's kinjiki ('forbidden colours') system, specific colours of court dress were reserved for specific ranks, with the emperor's sumac-dye colour banned for everyone else.

Tyrian purple (murex-snail dye) was the mark of the Roman emperor; its use was restricted by law to the imperial house and, earlier, to senatorial magistrates.

Red (with black) is a mourning colour among the Ashanti/Akan, worn at funerals and used as a ground colour of adinkra funeral cloth.

British soldiers' red coats were adopted and retained chiefly because red dyes were cheap and fast and because bright colours let troops distinguish friend from foe in musket smoke; the folk rationale that red hid bloodstains is explicitly questioned.

Red symbolizes good luck and wards off evil, and red envelopes stuffed with money are the standard lucky-money gift at Chinese New Year, weddings and business occasions.

In Chinese culture, red is the colour of birth and auspiciousness: red-dyed eggs are given out to celebrate a newborn and at the baby's one-month (full-moon) celebration, where red symbolises joy and eggs symbolise new life.

Red (the plain red flag) is the colour of left-wing politics: socialism, communism, anarchism and the labour movement.

In Han Chinese wedding practice red is the colour of good luck, happiness and celebration, and is worn by the bride and groom and used in wedding objects and decor; red is excluded from funerals because it is the colour of happiness.

The red cross (with the red crescent and red crystal) is a protective emblem of the Geneva Conventions used in armed conflict to mark medical and humanitarian persons and objects - it is a protective sign, not a general medical or first-aid symbol, and its misuse is unlawful.

Red is the mandated colour for prohibition, danger, stop, fire equipment and emergency-stop in international safety signage and signalling standards.

Red is a Korean wedding colour: brides' robes (hwarot) are red, unmarried women wore yellow jacket with red skirt, matrons green-and-red, and red-and-blue paired cloths carry the yin/yang symbolism of the union.

In the Western Christian liturgical calendar, red is the colour of Pentecost and of the Passion, and of the feasts of martyrs.

In the US, red denotes the Republican Party / right-leaning states ('red states'), a mapping fixed only in the 2000 election — the reverse of the European convention where red means left.

The popular story that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus's red-and-white suit is a marketing legend: documented sources say the red-and-white Santa image predated Coca-Cola, which used it in 1930s Haddon Sundblom advertising campaigns.

In mandated safety colour coding red is the basic colour for danger, stop and fire-protection equipment.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Five Buddha Families mandala, red is the colour of the Padma (Lotus) family headed by Amitābha, placed in the west, with the element fire.

Red is a Vietnamese wedding colour of luck and prosperity, used for the bride's layers and gowns and for the cloth and envelopes covering wedding gifts.

Red is the liturgical colour prescribed for Pentecost and for feasts of martyrs (and of the Lord's Passion, apostles and evangelists) in the Roman rite.

In Maya cosmology the Bacab Hobnil, who holds up the east, is coloured red; each of the four Bacabs carries one cardinal direction with its own colour and Year-Bearer day.

The red-stop / green-go / amber-caution traffic light scheme descends directly from 19th-century railway signalling, applied to road traffic from 1868 and standardised internationally in the 20th century.

In the Chinese Five Elements system, red (chì/zhū, vermilion) is the colour of the Fire element, corresponding to the direction south and the season summer.

The ISO/EU safety-colour scheme assigns each meaning a fixed colour: red = prohibition, danger and fire equipment; yellow = warning; blue = mandatory; green = safe condition — with red also used for fire/heat-related hazard equipment.

Red and golden yellow together form the standard Chinese auspicious pair, red standing for luck and happiness and gold for wealth and completeness.

Saffron is the colour of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva): the saffron bhagwa dhwaj flag of the RSS and the electoral colour of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The 2007 Burmese protests led by Theravada Buddhist monks were called the 'Saffron Revolution' in international media, after the monks' saffron robes.

Saffron (bhagwa) is a sacred colour in Hinduism, worn by Hindu saints and ascetics as an expression of devotion and of renunciation of material life.

Buddhist monastic robe colour varies by school: Theravada monks typically wear lighter saffron, while Tibetan (Vajrayana) monks wear maroon or red.

The Buddhist monastic robe (kasaya) is named after a brown or saffron dye; saffron/orange is the distinctive colour of fully ordained monks and nuns as a marker of monastic rank and renunciation.

The saffron scarf (kabney) is restricted by law to the King of Bhutan and the Chief Abbot; other colours are reserved for government and religious officers, and white for common people.

Scarlet - a fine woollen cloth dyed with kermes, the most expensive red dye - marked high rank (kings, bishops, cardinals) and was restricted to rank by English sumptuary statute.

The 'scarlet letter' — a red 'A' worn for life as public punishment for adultery — is documented as a literary device (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850, set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony); the sources opened do not establish it as an actual historical punishment.

In modern Western 'seasonal color analysis', each of the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) names a palette of colours said to harmonise with an individual's skin, hair and eye tones.

In Korean tradition the five cardinal colours (obangsaek) represent the five directions: blue=east, red=south, yellow=centre, white=west, black=north, with the same element pairings as the Chinese wuxing system.

In Hindu practice, vermilion (sindoor) applied by the groom to the bride's hair-parting at the wedding marks her as married and auspicious; red is thereby the colour of the married woman.

In the Western Christian liturgical calendar, violet (purple) is the colour of the two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent.

Violet is the liturgical colour of penance and mourning, prescribed for Advent and Lent and permitted for Offices and Masses for the Dead.

Among the Akan, white/undyed cotton is one of the traditional ground colours of adinkra funeral cloth, alongside red, dark brown and black.

In the Navajo (Diné) four-directions colour system, white is the colour of the east, associated with dawn and White Shell Mountain (Sisnaajiní).

In Chinese culture white is the traditional colour of mourning and death, associated with yin and ghosts, and funerals are called 'white affairs' (báishi 白事) - the reverse of the Western reading of white as purity and innocence.

White is the traditional Chinese colour of death and mourning, worn at funerals and named in the idiom for a death in the family ('white affairs', baishi), in direct opposition to red as the colour of weddings.

In the Chinese Five Elements system, white (bái) is the colour of the Metal element, corresponding to the direction west and the season autumn.

White is the colour of mourning and purity in Hindu funerary practice: the corpse is wrapped in white cloth (for a man or a widow) and mourners wear white at funerals.

In Islam white is a colour of purity and of equality before God: pilgrims enter the sacred state of ihram wearing two plain white unhemmed cloths, 'to signify that in front of God there is no difference between a prince and a pauper'.

In Japan white represents death and is the colour of the deceased's burial garments (a white kimono, shiro shōzoku), historically within the broader East Asian pattern of white as the mourning colour.

White on Yom Kippur symbolises purity and atonement — the angelic purity to be attained when the worshipper is finally absolved and pardoned — and the white kittel is also the burial shroud, linking judgment to mortality.

In Catholic baptism — in Roman-rite practice usually an infant rite — the white garment symbolises the newly baptised person having 'put on Christ' and risen with him, i.e. purity and new life at the start of Christian life.

In the Western Christian liturgical calendar, white is the festal colour of the two great joyful seasons, Christmastide and Eastertide.

White was historically the Thai mourning colour; modern Thai mourners wear black at funerals.

In Thai Buddhist practice white is auspicious and protective: monks bless a long white thread (sai sin) for luck, and lay people wear plain white when keeping the precepts.

Before gender colour-coding, white was the standard colour of infant and toddler dress in the US/UK — white cotton because it could be bleached — worn by both sexes until boys 'breeched' into trousers.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Five Buddha Families mandala, white is the colour of the Buddha family headed by Vairocana, placed at the centre, with the element space.

In the Western moral colour axis white signifies purity, innocence and righteousness, set against black as evil and sin.

White became the bridal colour of the Western Christian wedding, read as purity and, initially, as conspicuous display of wealth; the tradition is commonly credited to Queen Victoria's choice of a white gown at her 1840 wedding.

In Western clinical culture white has signified cleanliness, asepsis and the 'purity' of scientific medicine, worn by physicians as the white coat since the late 19th century.

In Maya cosmology the Bacab Cantzicnal, holding up the north, is white.

At the quinceañera, a girl's 15th-birthday coming-of-age celebration, the ceremonial dress is traditionally white (in modern practice white or pink, then any colour), the white symbolising the purity and innocence of the girl transitioning into womanhood.

In American Western films of the 1920s-1940s, white hats were worn by heroes and black hats by villains to encode the good-versus-evil contrast; whiteness was read as 'purity, cleanliness, and moral righteousness'.

The Roman rite uses a cycle of liturgical colours — white for festivals of the Lord, Mary and non-martyr saints and for Easter/Christmas, red for Pentecost and martyrs, green for Ordinary Time, violet for Advent and Lent, rose for Gaudete/Laetare — to give outward expression to the character of the mysteries celebrated through the liturgical year.

Yellow is reported to be used as a mourning colour among Chinese Buddhists, for whom yellow is also the monastic colour of renunciation.

In the Navajo four-directions colour system, yellow is the colour of the west, associated with Abalone Shell Mountain (Dookʼoʼoosłííd).

Jaundice names the yellowing of skin and eyes caused by bile pigment in the blood; the English word derives from Old French 'jaunice' ('yellowness', from 'jaune' = yellow), and Old English called it 'geolu adl' (yellow sickness).

In English, yellow has meant cowardly since 1856 (origin unknown); the colour was earlier associated with jealousy and envy, and 'yellow-bellied' (cowardly) appears from 1924.

A plain yellow flag (later the 'Quebec'/Q signal) historically signalled that a vessel carried or might carry dangerous disease and required quarantine; yellow had earlier marked houses of infection, and 'yellow jack' became a name for yellow fever.

In the Chinese Five Elements system, yellow (huáng) is the colour of the Earth element, corresponding to the centre (not a cardinal direction) and the last month of summer, the transitional season between the four others.

In the Tibetan Buddhist Five Buddha Families mandala, yellow is the colour of the Ratna (Jewel) family headed by Ratnasambhava, placed in the south, with the element earth.

In Maya cosmology the Bacab Zac-Cimi, holding up the south, is yellow.

Yellow was the colour of the Chinese emperor, the most prestigious hue, tied to earth and the centre in the wuxing (five-elements) system; in the Qing, bright yellow (minghuang) was reserved to the emperor and empress.

Yellow is the Chinese colour of the emperor and of good luck; it is considered the most beautiful and prestigious colour and, like gold, is paired with red in auspicious contexts.

Yellow (amber) is the mandated colour for warning of a hazard and for the caution phase between green and red.

In football, yellow means a caution and red means dismissal; the cards, introduced at the 1970 FIFA World Cup, were devised by English referee Ken Aston as a traffic-light colour code designed to be language-neutral.