Originally published at: Is this color blue? - Boing Boing
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The Japanese language only added green (as a word) relatively recently compared to other colors, so a lot of things that are clearly green (apples, traffic lights, vegetable juice) are still called blue.
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I got 171, greener than 67% of the population.
Apparently to me turquoise is blue.
To which I can only say: yes, of course it’s blue. The ocean is blue and I would never say turquoise waters are green.
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Turquoise is a greenish-blue, not a bluish-green.
Sometimes, the sea is more green than blue
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I agree
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I got 171 as well. The issue is I actually find the binary to be not useful. Teal and turquoise are a mixture of green and blue and I hated having to put it in one or the other.
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- Oh, and if it makes a difference, I’m red/green and, to a lesser degree, blue/yellow colorblind. To be perfectly honest, about half the screens I’d have said were “grey” if I were just asked color it was without context.
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I don’t really see green, but I can see blue pretty well. So for me the choice was ‘blue’ or ‘not blue.’ It rated me ‘true neutral’ (174) so I guess that worked.
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twixt the inflection points all glaucous am i
(learned of ‘glaucous’ in a taxonomy course and adopted it as my personal heraldry: banana slugs rampant)
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173, so turquoise is blue, because of course it is. Duh.
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Huh, I actually found it easier than I thought I would. I pretty much had an intuition on all of them, and rerunning the test several times, I get a consistent 171 (with one 170 outlier)
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Interesting. I had heard before that in most languages the word for blue came more recently.
There was a really interesting Radiolab episode about the history of the color blue, and how many cultures didn’t have a name for it until blue dyes and pigments started getting made:
They reference a study where some indigenous folks who didn’t have much experience with artificial blue colors in their surroundings were shown color boards with a lot of color samples, all shades of green with one blue sample thrown in, and asked to identify the color that was different. Many had trouble distinguishing the blue, seeing it as just another shade of green.
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Didn’t that dress resolve all that? 
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Another 171 here. Turquoise is most assuredly greenish-blue.
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175, and you’re all horribly wrong. 
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Japanese originally only had four colors: red, blue, black and white, so green was just treated as a shade of blue.
Then people started adding 色 to nouns to indicate other colors, like 茶色 (literally “tea color,” which is still used for brown in modern Japanese) or 灰色 (“ash color” for grey), so the language is kind of geared toward using “the color of something” instead of giving colors their own words, but there are more of those now. A lot of the newer colors are grammatical nouns (probably related to dyes) instead of adjectives, including green.
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I don’t know; some of this is green and some is blue. 
(I know they mean the color, not the mineral…)
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