Quote Originally Posted by lethearen View Post
I've heard someone comment before that men only see a dozen or so colours, and women see the full spectrum.
I don't think that's true, but it might certainly be true that women might use a larger vocabulary of names for different colours than men do.

Every person sees colours a bit differently. Even the two eyes of the same person don't see with exactly the same focal length, hue perception, contrast perception, etc.

Some languages only have two words for various colours, one corresponding more or less to "red" and covering all bright, intense, and warm hues, the other more or less corresponding to "black" and covering all dark, dull, or cool hues.

Gaelic has one word, "glas", which refers to any green, grey, pale, or dull colours.

Before we get uppity, we have to remember some English oddities in colour use. Americans use the word "hazel" to refer to an amazingly broad spectrum of eye colour, from brown to grey to green.

We also don't have words for many hair colours... I know because my wife's hair has been described as "brown", "red", and "bonde" and none really fit.

Colours exist in a continuum, but our words have boundries, so there can never be enough words to cover all the colours we can perceive.