Have you ever wondered how many colors exist in Spanish and what they are called? The question seems simple, but with new technologies, the 'Spanish' color palette has evolved tremendously. Nowadays we name colors that we would never have thought to name before. Some of them represent everyday objects, things we perceive every day and are used to distinguishing by their color, among other things. Others are born from fashion and styling. But there are colors that aren't even fixed colors. For example, the color PARDUSCO (or pardisco). If you open a dictionary and look up this word, you can find the following definition:
pardusco, ca
adj. Of a color close to brown: brownish hair. Also written pardisco.
But who knows what 'a color close to brown' really looks like, right? Therefore we search for the definition of PARDO:
pardo, da
1. adj. Of a reddish-brown color: brown bear. Also used as a noun: the brown of his eyes enchants me.
2. Dark: a gray day.
3. Applied to a voice that doesn't have a clear timbre and is not very vibrant: dull voice.
4. amer. It used to refer to a mulatto, a person of mixed Black and White ancestry or vice versa.
With which we can hardly reach a single conclusion, since:
4. There also exists the color 'chocolate', which is most similar to the skin color of a person of mixed race.
3. It is said of a voice that is not vibrant (if referring to its amplitude) that it is 'deep'. The clarity of timbre is quite relative, with the color 'light' existing. We can reserve the right to relate the brown of a voice to the brown of the bear, by metonymy, but even then we don't arrive at what the color brown is.
2. Brown = Dark, but we still don't reach anything concrete while excluding light colors (50% of the palette).
1. 'Of a reddish-brown color' sounds somewhat better, since we know the color brown. But there goes that 'reddish' quality! One would have to define this color, which combines with brown, to obtain the color 'brown'.
The illustrative example of the bear, with its brown fur, the so-called 'brown bear', might perhaps clear up some doubts for us. But do all brown bears have the same color fur? If the answer were affirmative, it would be enough for us to see it to process and define that shade with our brains. But what if it weren't...?
0. We search for 'reddish' and we find this definition:
rojizo, za
adj. That tends toward red: reddish hair.
Well! If reddish tends toward red, then it's a shade or a color that resembles red. But which one should be used in the mixture for brown!? If we don't know how to obtain the color brown, how will we know what the color PARDUSCO is? No way... We'll have to settle for the clues we have at the moment, to get closer to this so indefinite color, which if it didn't exist, wouldn't be named. To summarize:
PARDUSCO – Dark color, from the mixture of brown with the reddish shade present in the fur of the Brown Bear (планинска мечка).
And that's not all. There are:
the color flesh, beige, bluish, grayish, yellowish, peach, lime-green, khaki, pistachio, turquoise, lime, orange, sky-blue, fuchsia, caramel, off-white, rainbow, blackish, magenta, gold (or golden), silver (or silver color) and even the color transparent or color spectrum (a multicolor range).
So you tell me if you know the colors in Spanish 🙂