This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 3 January 2023. This article is about purple yam cookie of the color. For the M2M album, see Shades of Purple.

There are numerous variations of the color purple, a sampling of which are shown below. In common English usage, purple is a range of hues of color occurring between red and blue. However, the meaning of the term purple is not well defined. The first recorded use of purple as a color name in English was in 975 AD.

Tyrian purple” is the contemporary English name of the color that in Latin is denominated “purpura”. Other contemporary English names for purpura are “imperial purple” and “royal purple”. The English name “purple” itself originally denominated the specific color purpura. Tyrian purple may have been discovered as early as during the Minoan civilization. The tone of Tyrian purple displayed above is that tone of Tyrian purple which was the color of “clotted blood”, which was considered the tone having the most prestige in ancient Greece and Rome, as recorded by Pliny the Elder. However, the actual tone varied depending on how the dye was formulated.

Han purple is a type of artificial pigment found in China between 500 BC and AD 220. It was used in the decoration of the Terracotta Army. The color royal purple is a tone of purple that is bluer than the ancient Tyrian purple. The first recorded use of royal purple as a color name in English was in 1661.

In 1990, royal purple was formulated as one of the Crayola crayon colors. Mauveine was first named in 1856. Chemist Sir William Henry Perkin, then eighteen, was attempting to create artificial quinine. Mauveine” was named after the mauve colored mallow flower, even though it is a much deeper tone of purple than mauve. The term “Mauve” in the late 19th century could refer to either the deep, rich color of the dye or the light color of the flower. Even among modern native speakers of English there is confusion about the terms purple and violet.

Artists’ pigments and colored pencils labeled as purple are typically colored the red-violet color. On an RYB color wheel, the so-called red-violet color is the color between red and violet. This color, electric purple, is precisely halfway between violet and magenta and thus fits the artistic definition of purple. Using additive colors such as those on computer screens, it is possible to create a much brighter purple than with pigments where the mixing subtracts frequencies from the component primary colors. The equivalent color on a computer to the pigment color red-violet shown above would be this electric purple, i. An old name for this color, used by Robert Ridgway in his 1912 book on color nomenclature, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, is true purple.

It seems likely that this color was chosen as the web color purple because its hue is exactly halfway between red and blue and its value is exactly halfway between white and black. A traditional name sometimes used for this tone of purple is patriarch. The first recorded use of patriarch as a color name in English was in 1925. This is one of the very few clashes between web and X11 colors.