A Review of Color Naming and Color Categorization

Human visual system is able to distinguish numerous numbers of colors. However, this matter has been always raised how the people would like to categorize colors into main clusters and which words, they usually use to name them. In this issue, Kay and Berlin’s researches are the most important studies. They claimed industrialized human societies usually categorize the colors into 11 main groups, including: Black, White, Gray, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Pink, Orange, Brown and Purple. This paper is a review on color naming to introduce and discuss the concept of color naming and color categorization, the experimental procedure of color naming, and the results presented in several investigations. Dividing color spaces into fuzzy sets for color categorization, establishment of WCS and MACS research centre, experiment done for color naming, naming array, color naming data analysis, some samples of WCS languages and universal color naming for all languages are reviewed.