What's in a name? A lot, actually.

Almost everyone has school memories of the student — or students — who had to bear the brunt of having a name that others couldn’t, or wouldn’t, correctly pronounce. A name that was different from their peers, or “difficult” for a teacher to say out loud. But the question is, different from what, and why was the pronunciation challenging? A name like Kholoud may raise an eyebrow in the United States, but in many Arabic-speaking countries, the name is much more common.

The Surprising Pattern Behind Color Names Around The World

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order. They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge.