“Edible” colour names: Cross-cultural comparison of Russian and English

We explored differences between Russian and English languages in incidences of colour names related to food and edible substances. Colour names were elicited in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment with native speakers of Russian (N=713; 333 males) and English (N=272, 113 males). Colour samples (N=600) were approximately uniformly distributed in the Munsell Color Solid. An unconstrained colour-naming method was employed. A refined dataset comprised 14,260 responses from Russian and 5,428 responses from English speakers. For each language dataset, we report the inventory of “edible” colour names, their frequency, and derivational productivity. We conclude that, along with the natural environment, the inventory of “edible” terms is language-specific and manifests culture-specific culinary worldview.