# Colourful Language: Measuring Word-Colour Associations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Mining Contextualized Visual Associations from Images for Creativity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18915/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complimented with the use of appropriate colours in information visualization and product marketing. Yet, there is no comprehensive resource that captures concept-colour associations. We present a method to create a large word-colour association lexicon by crowdsourcing. We focus especially on abstract concepts and emotions to show that even though they cannot be physically visualized, they too tend to have strong colour associations. Finally, we show how word-colour associations manifest themselves in language, and quantify usefulness of co-occurrence and polarity cues in automatically detecting colour associations.