Red is the color of blood and strawberries. It is next to orange at the end of the visible spectrum of light, and is commonly associated with danger, sacrifice, passion, love, anger, socialism and communism, and in China and many other cultures, with happiness.
The word red comes from the Old English rēd. The word can be further traced to the Proto-Germanic rauthaz and the Proto-Indo European root reudh-. In Sanskrit, the word rudhira means red or blood. In the Akkadian language of Ancient Mesopotamia and in the modern Inuit language of Eskimos, the word for red is the same word as “like blood”.
The words for ‘colored’ in Latin (coloratus) and Spanish (colorado) both also mean ‘red.’
In the Russian language, the word for red, Кра́сный (krasniy), comes from the same old Slavic root as the words for “beautiful”—красивый (krasiviy) and “excellent”—прекрасный (prekrasniy). Thus Red Square in Moscow, named long before the Russian Revolution, meant simply “Beautiful Square”.
Red can vary in…