pink pink!

I really enjoyed the discussion of yesterday’s rose / pink post. In the comments, we heard about different words for this colour in Dutch (Titia), Armenian (Annie), Finnish (Helen) and Hindi, Tamil and Gujarati (Deepa).

Rebecca told us about how she’d been instructed that the liturgical vestments worn on Gaudete Sunday are definitely rose, and not pink in hue, while several of you mentioned your understanding that the meaning of pink (as a colour concept) arose out of the characteristically serrated edges of the dianthus flower, rather than (as Michel Pastoureau would have it), from the flesh-y associations of the word carnation (with its etymological roots in incarnata).

Pastoureau’s Pink: The History of a Color (2025) pays considerably less attention to pink’s complex lexical history in English than in his native French (which is entirely understandable), and discussion of the association of “pinking” with piercing or perforating (familiar to all of us who possess a pair of pinking shears) is absent from his book. I woke up this morning thinking about Pastoureau’s omission, as well as the curiously wide range of meanings of pink in English, and have spent a very pleasant few hours poking about in the full Oxford English Dictionary (paywalled, but accessible through many library memberships: I use my National Library of Scotland card).

The OED tells us that, as a colour concept, pink is a very frequently used word in modern English:

While the OED data suggests that most speakers of modern English would today be in general agreement about the meaning of the word pink as colour concept, the etymology of the term is very fuzzy indeed. Under pink as noun and adjective, the OED says “origin uncertain”, and suggests the etymon of pink as verb (ie, the pinking association that Maria, Karen and Rebecca raised in yesterday’s discussion). But then, under the corresponding general entry of pink as verb, the OED once again tells us that the “origin is uncertain,” qualifying this with “probably an imitative or expressive formation,” which is suggestive of a word with an onomatopoeiac root. We’ll return to the evocative sonic qualities of pinking later, but as there was so much uncertainty in the general etymology, I decided to sort and examine all of the OEDs quoted incidences of the word pink – as noun, adjective, and verb – from the earliest to the most recent.

Some of the OED’s earliest recorded uses of pink (pyncke) relate to pigments. I expected this, and was interested to confirm an interesting chromatic curiosity (which is fully discussed in Michel Pastoureau’s book), regarding the Medieval blurring of the colour concepts of pink and yellow (both being shades which might be seen or positioned, in various senses, between white and red). In 1464, one source quoted by the OED describes pyncke as “a yellowish or greenish-yellow lake.”while another refers to pyncke–yellow. A pinkish-yellow? A yellowish-pink, perhaps?

Other fifteenth-century sources quoted by the OED describe pyncke as a sort of drab – pale brown or beige – colour. By the following century pink begins to look more recognisable, in the OED’s various references to the pyncke produced from brazilwood, a costly dye whose hues sit much more squarely within our contemporary understanding of the modern pink colour concept.

Alongside this somewhat uneven lexical emergence of pink as a descriptor of fifteenth-century dyes and pigments, the OED also reveals our parallel sense of pinking as processes of piercing or perforating. The earliest instance I could find of pink as verb was from 1486, when it is used in reference to punching holes in leather. In 1512, a sleeve’s decorative scalloped edges might be described as “pinked” and later in the 16th century a shoemaker could describe the process of preparing footwear “pinkt with letters for thy name.”

In the middle of the fifteenth century, then pyncke emerges as a colour (of somewhat uncertain hue) while a couple of decades later, different decorative or ornamental objects are being described as pinkt. And between these two fifteenth-century strands of pink, we find a third, in the word that is attached in both colloquial English and Scots to flowers of various kinds, but most frequently to the dianthus or carnation.

The OED’s first reference to a pink in this floral context is 1538. So does the flower’s pink homynym arise from its colouring (pyncke pigment) or from its serrated petals (pinkt out, like the ruffled edges of a sleeve)?

Scholars of Medieval and early modern English are much better placed than I am to answer that question, but from the OED’s own references it’s clear that the colloquial use of the word pink in reference to flowers seems, in this period, rather imprecise. An OED headnote tells us that “the distinction between pinks and carnations is often not entirely clear” and between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, we can also find the word pink being used in English and Scots vernaculars in reference to thrift (armeria maritima) and ragged robin (silene flos-cuculi) as well as several different kinds of dianthus. All of these flowers are pink in hue (pyncke) and all have ruffly petals (pinkt). Does one or the other sense of the word predominate, or are both senses of pink involved in lending these flowers a name?

Let us park the pink flower, with its attractively pinked petals, and move on to explore the explosive expansion of pink into new semantic territory in the early modern period.

By the close of the sixteenth century, pink carries several different cultural meanings in English, which begin to intersect and overlap in fascinating ways. The first sense of pink is as the quintessence, or most excellent example of something, as when Mercutio describes himself as “the very pinke of curtesie” in Romeo and Juliet (1597). Second, in what is probably an expansion of pink’s meaning from a process of perforating or piercing, the word pinking is used in reference to the effect of eyes peeping out through half-closed lids, or women fluttering their eyelashes (memorably referred to in Scots as “playing pinkie winkie”). And there is a third use of pink, in this period, in reference to many things that are diminutive (little fingers, small fish, small boats, small children, tiny gaps). Pink as teeny weeny, then as well as pinkie winkie.

As we explored yesterday, in the eighteenth century, pink became an incredibly fashionable colour, due to increasing availability of brazilwood dyes. Yet, in this age of extremes, as Mercutio’s “pink of curtesie” became the “pink of the mode” (ie, the height of fashion), pink also begins to tip over into negative meanings of refinement and excess. It’s here, in its sense of over-mannered, I think, that pink’s familiar associations with dandyism or purported masculine deviance originate. And perhaps because of pink’s popularity among French courtesans in this era, pink is also a colour increasingly associated, in eighteenth-century erotic literature, with women’s sexual impropriety.

The OED dates pink’s connection to an over-optimistic, rosy outlook (rose-tinted spectacles; la vie en rose) to 1816, which is just one of a dizzying range of references this colour accrues in English over the course of the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. Pink’s connection to engine rattling (also mentioned yesterday) dates to 1910, while to be handed a “pink slip”, in early twentieth-century America, was to receive a rejection letter or bad news. Because officers wrote memoranda on pink notepads, “pink” was also a description of hush-hush matters in the British navy, while a “pink ‘un” might refer to a sports-covering newspaper, several varieties of potato, or, in Australia and New Zealand, a newly sheared sheep. To be “pinko” was to be drunk (possibly accompanied by pink elephants) while one might express a sense of exasperation as reaching “the pink limit.” Have we now reached our pink limit, pink’s pinacle, the end of the pink line?

Before I leave you, I’d like to throw out a big pink curve ball, which I happened across this morning during my etymological searches of the OED. This pink has nothing to do with pigments or dyes, with perforated leather, orwith decorative scalloped cuffs. It does not concern carnations or roses, or flowers of any kind, nor does it draw comparisons which are difficult to stomach with meaty or fleshy things. No: this pink thing is a completely ordinary, yet immediately evocative sound-word capturing the call of a familiar bird . . .

PINK PINK!

The OED reveals that the word “pink” in reference to the call of the chaffinch, and by extension, to the bird itself, has been in use in English and Scots vernaculars since 1425 – a date which precedes by several decades both pink-the-pigment-noun (1464) and pink-the-perforating-verb (1486). Medieval people all over these islands recognised the chaffinch by a sound they called “pink pink”, and we still do so today, in common parlance and ornothological reference guide alike. Remember the OED’s suggestion of the assumed origin of pink in a sonic “imitative or expressive formation”? Could the chaffinch, with its immediately recognisable “pinking” sound (and whose body is also subtly pink in hue) be the sonic and chromatic origin of pink?

I leave it up to you.

PINK PINK!

Tom provided the photography of carnations, pinks and chaffinches. The shade card pinks are from volumes 1 and 2 of the British Colour Council’s Horticultural Colour Chart (1939; 1941) For more colourful discussions, you might enjoy this book, which I produced with my chromatic comrade, Felix Ford.