There’s a website called “The Conversation” that reported recently on scientific research into how the words for color are used in different languages.
Ted Gibson and Bevil R. Conway wrote, “People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. …
“Maybe if you’re an artist or an interior designer, you know specific meanings for as many as 50 or 100 different words for colors – like turquoise, amber, indigo or taupe. But this is still a tiny fraction of the colors that we can distinguish.
“Interestingly, the ways that languages categorize color vary widely. Nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures. … The Papua-New Guinean language Berinmo has only five, and the Bolivian Amazonian language Tsimane’ has only three words that everyone knows, corresponding to black, white and red.
“The goal of our project was to understand why cultures vary so much in their color word usage. …
“In English, it turns out that people can convey the warm colors – reds, oranges and yellows – more efficiently (with fewer guesses) than the cool colors – blues and greens. …
“We found that this generalization is true in every language in the entire World Color Survey (110 languages) and in three more that we did detailed experiments on: English, Spanish and Tsimane’. …
“Our idea is that maybe we introduce words into a language when there is something that we want to talk about. So perhaps this effect arises because objects – the things we want to talk about – tend to be warm-colored. …
“We mapped the colors in the images [of objects] onto our set of 80 colors across the color space. It turned out that indeed objects are more likely to be warm-colored, while backgrounds are cool-colored. …
“When you think about it, this doesn’t seem so surprising after all. Backgrounds are sky, water, grass, trees: all cool-colored. The objects that we want to talk about are warm-colored: people, animals, berries, fruits and so on. …
“[This] communication hypothesis helped identify a true cross-linguistic universal – warm colors are easier to communicate than cool ones – and it easily explains the cross-cultural differences in color terms. It also explains why color words often come into a language not as color words but as object or substance labels. For instance, ‘orange’ comes from the fruit; ‘red’ comes from Sanskrit for blood. In short, we label things that we want to talk about.”
More here. The article gets pretty technical, but after struggling last Tuesday to find warm and cool colors in a jumbled box for ESL students, I appreciate having confirmation that warm colors (red, orange, yellow) have fewer competing names than cool ones (blue, blue-green, violet, purple, aquamarine, turquoise …).
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Very interesting. I have not thought about it although I am intrested in colors
I know. I am going to start noticing if most objects are warm colors and most backgrounds cool colors. Guess that rules out New England’s miles of autumn leaves.
This is fascinating! Never thought at all about it but, once I read what you have here, it makes lot of sense!
It was clever to compare the salience of warm and cool colors by looking at different languages. We keep learning that humans from different cultures have more things in common than we thought.