The middle color of the rainbow. All the colors of the rainbow in order for children, schoolchildren: the correct sequence and names of colors

As it turned out, not all nations have 7 colors in their rainbow. Some have six, particularly in America, and there are those who have only 4. In general, the question is not at all simple, as it might seem at first glance

And as often happens on the vast expanses of the Internet, an article was found on this topic. It was written so interestingly that I couldn’t resist and decided to re-publish it so that everyone could get acquainted with it.

The phrase “every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits” has been known to everyone since childhood. This mnemonic device, the so-called acrophonic method of memorization, is designed to remember the sequence of colors of the rainbow. Here, each word of the phrase begins with the same letter as the name of the color: each = red, hunter = orange, etc. In the same way, those who were initially confused about the sequence of colors of the Russian flag realized that the abbreviation KGB (from bottom to top) was suitable to describe it and were no longer confused.
Such mnemonics are acquired by the brain at the level of so-called “conditioning” rather than just learning. Considering that people, like all other animals, are terrible conservatives, then any information that has been drilled into the head since childhood for many is very difficult to change or is even simply blocked from a critical approach. For example, Russian children know from school that there are seven colors in the rainbow. This is rote, familiar, and many are sincerely perplexed as to how it is that in some countries the number of colors of the rainbow can be completely different. But the seemingly undoubted statements “there are seven colors in the rainbow”, as well as “there are 24 hours in a day”, are only products of human imagination and have nothing to do with nature. One of those cases when an arbitrary fiction becomes “reality” for many.

Rainbows have always been seen differently in different periods of history and in different peoples. It distinguished three primary colors, and four, and five, and as many as you like. Aristotle identified only three colors: red, green, violet. The Rainbow Serpent of the Australian Aborigines was six-colored. In the Congo, the rainbow is represented by six snakes - according to the number of colors. Some African tribes see only two colors in the rainbow - dark and light.

So where did the notorious seven colors in the rainbow come from? This is exactly the rare case when the source is known to us. Although the phenomenon of the rainbow was explained by refraction sun rays in raindrops back in 1267, Roger Bacon, but only Newton thought of analyzing light and, refracting a ray of light through a prism, first counted five colors: red, yellow, green, blue, violet (he called it purple). Then the scientist took a closer look and saw six colors. But the number six did not appeal to the believer Newton. Nothing other than a demonic obsession. And the scientist “spotted” another color. The number seven suited him: an ancient and mystical number - there are seven days of the week, and seven deadly sins. Newton thought of indigo as the seventh color. Thus Newton became the father of the seven-color rainbow. True, his very idea of the white spectrum, as a collection of people of color, was not liked by everyone at that time. Even the eminent German poet Goethe was indignant, calling Newton's statement a “monstrous assumption.” After all, it cannot be that the most transparent, purest white color turned out to be a mixture of “dirty” colored rays! But nevertheless, over time, I had to admit that the scientist was right.

The division of the spectrum into seven colors took root, and in English language the next memory appeared - Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (In - for blue indigo). And over time, they forgot about indigo and there were six colors. Thus, in the words of J. Baudrillard (albeit said on a completely different occasion), “the model became the primary reality, hyperreality, turning the whole world into Disneyland.”

Now our “magical Disneyland” is very diverse. Russians will argue until they are hoarse about the seven-color rainbow. American children are taught the six primary colors of the rainbow. English (German, French, Japanese) too. But it's even more complicated. In addition to the difference in the number of colors, there is another problem - the colors are not the same. The Japanese, like the British, believe that there are six colors in the rainbow. And they will be happy to name them for you: red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo and violet. Where did the green go? Nowhere, it's in Japanese simply no. The Japanese, when rewriting Chinese characters, lost the green character (it exists in Chinese). Now in Japan there is no green color, which leads to funny incidents. Russian specialist, working in Japan, complained about how he once had to look for a long time for a blue (aoi) folder on his desk. Only the green one lay in plain sight. Which the Japanese see as blue. And not because they are color blind, but because in their language there is no such color as green. That is, it seems to be there, but it’s a shade of blue, like our scarlet – a shade of red. Now, under external influence, there is, of course, green color(midori) - but from their point of view this is a shade of blue (aoi). That is, not the main color. So they get blue cucumbers, blue folders and blue traffic lights.

The British will agree with the Japanese on the number of colors, but not on the composition. The English (and other Romance languages) do not have blue in their language. And if there is no word, then there is no color. They, of course, are also not colorblind, and they distinguish cyan from dark blue, but for them it is just “light blue” - that is, not the main one. So the Englishman would have been looking for the mentioned folder even longer.

Thus, the perception of colors depends only on a specific culture. And thinking in a particular culture depends heavily on language. The question of “colors of the rainbow” is not a matter of physics and biology. It should be dealt with by linguistics and, even more broadly, by philology, since the colors of the rainbow depend only on the language of communication, there is nothing a priori physical behind them. The spectrum of light is continuous, and its arbitrarily selected areas (“colors”) can be called whatever you like - with the words that exist in the language. There are seven colors in the rainbow of the Slavic peoples only because there is a separate name for blue (cf. the British) and green (cf. the Japanese).

But the problems of flowers don’t end there; life is even more confusing. In the Kazakh language, for example, the rainbow has seven colors, but the colors themselves do not match the Russian ones. The color that is translated into Russian as blue is in the Kazakh perception a mixture of blue and green, yellow is a mixture of yellow and green. That is, what is considered a mixture of colors among Russians is considered an independent color among Kazakhs. American orange is by no means our orange, but often rather red (in our understanding). By the way, in the case of hair color, on the contrary, red is red. It’s the same with old languages - L. Gumilyov wrote about the difficulties of identifying colors in Turkic texts with Russian ones, for example “sary” - it can be the color of gold, or the color of leaves, because occupies part of the “Russian yellow” range and part of the “Russian green”.

Colors also change over time. In the Kiev collection of 1073 it is written: “In the rainbow, the properties are red, and blue, and green, and crimson.” Then, as we see, in Rus' four colors were distinguished in the rainbow. But what are these colors? Now we would understand them as red, blue, green and red. But it was not always so. For example, what we call white wine was called green wine in ancient times. Crimson could mean any dark color, even black. And the word red was not a color at all, but originally meant beauty, and in this sense it was preserved in the combination “red maiden”.

How many colors are there really in a rainbow? This question makes virtually no sense. The wavelengths of visible light (in the range of 400-700 nm) can be called whatever colors are convenient - they, the waves, are neither warm nor cold. In a real rainbow, of course, there is an infinite number of “colors” - a full spectrum, and you can select as many “colors” from this spectrum as you like (conventional colors, linguistic ones, those for which we can come up with words).

An even more correct answer would be: not at all, colors do not exist in nature at all - only our imagination creates the illusion of color. R.A. Wilson liked to quote an old Zen koan on this subject: “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?” Buddhists have always understood this. The colors of the rainbow are created by the same Master. And he can create them in completely different ways. As someone noted: “steelworkers distinguish a lot of shades in the transition from yellow to red...”

The same Wilson also noted the following point: “Did you know that an orange is ‘really’ blue? It absorbs blue light that passes through its skin. But we see an orange as “orange” because there is no orange light in it. The orange light reflects off its skin and hits the retina of our eyes. The “essence” of the orange is blue, but we don’t see it; in our brains orange is orange, and we see it. Who is the Master who makes an orange orange?

Osho wrote about the same thing: “Each ray of light consists of seven colors of the rainbow. Your clothes are red for one strange reason. They are not red. Your clothes absorb six colors from the beam of light - all except red. Red is reflected back. The remaining six are absorbed. Because red is reflected, it gets into other people's eyes, so they see your clothes as red. It is a very contradictory situation: your clothes are not red, that is why they appear red.” Let us note that for Osho the rainbow is seven-colored, even though he already lived in “six-colored” America.

From the point of view of modern biology, a person sees three colors in a rainbow, because a person perceives shades by three types of cells. Physiologically according to modern concepts healthy people must distinguish between three colors: red, green, blue (Red, Green, Blue - RGB). In addition to cells that respond only to brightness, some cones in the human eye respond selectively to wavelength. Biologists have identified three types of color-sensitive cells (cones) - that is, RGB. Three colors are enough for us to create any shade. The rest of the infinite number of different intermediate shades is completed by the brain, based on the ratios of irritability of these three types of cells. Is this the final answer? Not really, this is also just a convenient model (In “reality”, the eye’s sensitivity to blue is significantly lower than to green and red).

Thais, like us, are taught in school that there are seven colors in the rainbow. The veneration of the number seven arose in ancient times due to humanity’s knowledge of the seven known to it at that time. celestial bodies(moon, sun and five planets). This is where the seven-day week appeared in Babylon. Each day corresponded to its planet. This system was adopted by the Chinese and spread further. Over time, the number seven became almost sacred; each day of the week had its own god. The Christian “six-day” with an additional day off on Sunday (in Russian, originally called “week” - from “not to do”) spread throughout the world. So it is unlikely that Newton could have “discovered” another number of colors in the rainbow.

But in Everyday life The number of perceived colors among Thais depends on where they live. The city will soon have an official number of seven. But in the provinces it’s different. Moreover, the colors of the rainbow can vary even in neighboring villages. For example, in some settlements in the northeast there are two orange colors, “som” and “sed.” The second word means something like “more orange.” As is the case with, say, the Chukchi, who have more different names for white, since they have long distinguished shades white snow, the Thais’ selection of a separate color is not accidental. In those places, a beautiful “dokjang” flower grows on the trees, the color of which is different from the usual color of the catfish orange.

The colors of the rainbow are 7 spectral tones into which a white beam of light is split. As a celestial phenomenon, it is considered fabulously beautiful and is often depicted in art, creativity, and other cultural fields.

7 tones can be remembered with a simple counting rhyme: Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits. Capital letters are the names of the shades.

These 7 colors are located in the rainbow in descending order of wavelength ()

To make it easy to remember the arrangement of tones in a rainbow, there is a nursery rhyme.

The colors of the rainbow are the original, natural range of tones, relative to which all available shades are constructed, with the exception of achromatic, complex and intermediate ones.
Achromatic colors include: white, black, gray. For complex ones: neutral, brown, beige. Intermediate: pink, purple, since they are not spectral, but the result of visualization of the display of red and violet wavelengths (shortest + longest) on the retina.

The rainbow is a heavenly gift in the understanding of color, its ancestor and inspirer. This is aesthetics, symbolism, which takes place in many religions.

USEFUL ARTICLES ON THIS TOPIC (click on the picture)

How many colors does the rainbow have? It would seem like a childish question. Everyone knows that there are only seven of them - remember the sayings about “pheasant” and “Jean the bell ringer”. But not all nations agree with this “truth”. And if we turn to a scientific approach, the idea of seven colors will burst like a soap bubble.

At first glance, a rainbow looks like a bright arc created from several colors. Their list is well known: from red to purple. In the scientific community, this figure was determined by Newton - in his work (“Optics”) he substantiated and expanded the theory of de Dominis and Descartes. The researcher explained the reasons for the interesting phenomenon and highlighted a list of colors. True, the sequence is somewhat different. Green is followed by blue, then indigo, and then violet. So it’s difficult to give an exact answer to the question, how many colors does a rainbow have?

The result differed depending on the people and period of history. Aristotle, for example, defined only three colors: red, green and violet. He shared his idea of this phenomenon in the section of his work “Meteorology”. He later increased the number to seven.

Australian Aborigines believed that the rainbow had six colors. The same amount is now allocated in some English-speaking countries. In the Congo, the rainbow arc is even represented in the form of six bright snakes. Some African tribes, when asked how many colors a rainbow has, will give a laconic answer: two. They divide the entire spectrum of colors into light and dark. German, Japanese and French children are taught the concept of six colors.

It is curious that the Japanese do not have green on their list. The British do not have blue - in their opinion, it is just a shade of blue. So the perception of a rainbow depends on the specific culture. Therefore, the question of colors goes beyond physics and biology; philology should also deal with it. For example, in the Kazakh language the number of colors coincides with our usual one. But the ideas themselves are different.

In a rainbow, the spectrum is continuous - different colors transform into each other smoothly, through many intermediate shades. It is easy to find an infinite number of “colors” - you can select as many of them as you like. After all, these are conventional names, linguistic.

It is much easier to answer a practical question - for example, what to do if you have oily skin on your face? The problem is easy to solve and get visible results. And if we also remember that there are different rainbows? Arcs are more common, but there are others that arise for similar reasons, although they look almost the same. This is a foggy rainbow (white) - it appears on miniature droplets of fog, a fiery (halo type) - on cirrus clouds, and a lunar one appears at night.

We never thought that we would ever return to this topic, namely, how many colors does the rainbow have?

It all started with the most famous memorization about the fact that “Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits.”

We then collected a whole collection different options This memory book is about a hunter, and for programmers, and Belarusian, and Ukrainian, and many others. There were so many of them that we even opened them in our “Encyclopedia”

And then it turned out that not all nations have 7 colors in their rainbow. Some have six, particularly in America, and there are those who have only 4. In general, the question is not at all simple, as it might seem at first glance

And as often happens on the vast expanses of the Internet, an article was found on this topic. It was written so interestingly that we could not resist and decided to re-publish it so that our readers could also familiarize themselves with it.

How many colors does a rainbow drink?

…when you see a rainbow, don’t separate yourself from it

when you see a beautiful sunset, become it

it's the mind that divides

in fact, the stars dot the sky

are inside us, and we are in them

there is no separation

there is no border...

Such mnemonics are acquired by the brain at the level of so-called “conditioning” rather than just learning. Considering that people, like all other animals, are terrible conservatives, then any information that has been drilled into the head since childhood for many is very difficult to change or is even simply blocked from a critical approach. For example, Russian children know from school that there are seven colors in the rainbow. This is rote, familiar, and many are sincerely perplexed as to how it is that in some countries the number of colors of the rainbow can be completely different. But the seemingly undoubted statements “there are seven colors in the rainbow”, as well as “there are 24 hours in a day”, are only products of human imagination and have nothing to do with nature. One of those cases when an arbitrary fiction becomes “reality” for many.

So where did the notorious seven colors in the rainbow come from? This is exactly the rare case when the source is known to us. Although the phenomenon of the rainbow was explained by the refraction of sun rays in raindrops back in 1267, Roger Bacon, but only Newton thought of analyzing light and, refracting a ray of light through a prism, first counted five colors: red, yellow, green, blue, violet (he called it purple ). Then the scientist took a closer look and saw six colors. But the number six did not appeal to the believer Newton. Nothing other than a demonic obsession. And the scientist “spotted” another color. The number seven suited him: an ancient and mystical number - there are seven days of the week, and seven deadly sins. Newton thought of indigo as the seventh color. Thus Newton became the father of the seven-color rainbow. True, his very idea of the white spectrum, as a collection of people of color, was not liked by everyone at that time. Even the eminent German poet Goethe was indignant, calling Newton's statement a “monstrous assumption.” After all, it cannot be that the most transparent, purest white color turned out to be a mixture of “dirty” colored rays! But nevertheless, over time, I had to admit that the scientist was right.

The division of the spectrum into seven colors took root, and the following memorization appeared in the English language - Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (In - for blue indigo). And over time, they forgot about indigo and there were six colors. Thus, in the words of J. Baudrillard (albeit said on a completely different occasion), “the model became the primary reality, hyperreality, turning the whole world into Disneyland.”

Now our “magical Disneyland” is very diverse. Russians will argue until they are hoarse about the seven-color rainbow. American children are taught the six primary colors of the rainbow. English (German, French, Japanese) too. But it's even more complicated. In addition to the difference in the number of colors, there is another problem - the colors are not the same. The Japanese, like the British, believe that there are six colors in the rainbow. And they will be happy to name them for you: red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo and violet. Where did the green go? Nowhere, it’s simply not in the Japanese language. The Japanese, when rewriting Chinese characters, lost the green character (it exists in Chinese). Now in Japan there is no green color, which leads to funny incidents. A Russian specialist working in Japan complained about how he once had to look for a long time for a blue (aoi) folder on his desk. Only the green one lay in plain sight. Which the Japanese see as blue. And not because they are color blind, but because in their language there is no such color as green. That is, it seems to be there, but it’s a shade of blue, like our scarlet – a shade of red. Now, under external influence, there is, of course, the color green (midori) - but from their point of view, this is a shade of blue (aoi). That is, not the main color. So they get blue cucumbers, blue folders and blue traffic lights.

From the point of view of modern biology, a person sees three colors in a rainbow, because a person perceives shades by three types of cells. Physiologically, according to modern concepts, healthy people should distinguish between three colors: red, green, blue (Red, Green, Blue - RGB). In addition to cells that respond only to brightness, some cones in the human eye respond selectively to wavelength. Biologists have identified three types of color-sensitive cells (cones) - that is, RGB. Three colors are enough for us enough to create any shade. The rest of the infinite number of different intermediate shades is completed by the brain, based on the ratios of irritability of these three types of cells. Is this the final answer? Not really, this is also just a convenient model (In “reality”, the eye’s sensitivity to blue is significantly lower than to green and red).

Thais, like us, are taught in school that there are seven colors in the rainbow. The veneration of the number seven arose in ancient times due to humanity’s knowledge of the then seven celestial bodies known to it (the moon, the sun and the five planets). This is where the seven-day week appeared in Babylon. Each day corresponded to its planet. This system was adopted by the Chinese and spread further. Over time, the number seven became almost sacred; each day of the week had its own god. The Christian “six-day” with an additional day off on Sunday (in Russian, originally called “week” - from “not to do”) spread throughout the world. So it is unlikely that Newton could have “discovered” another number of colors in the rainbow.

But in everyday life, the number of perceived colors among Thais depends on where they live. The city will soon have an official number of seven. But in the provinces it’s different. Moreover, the colors of the rainbow can vary even in neighboring villages. For example, in some settlements in the northeast there are two orange colors, “som” and “sed.” The second word means something like “more orange.” As is the case, say, with the Chukchi, who have more different names for the color white in their language, since they have long distinguished shades of white snow, the Thais’ selection of a separate color is not accidental. In those places, a beautiful “dokjang” flower grows on the trees, the color of which is different from the usual color of the catfish orange. You most likely will not find this word in the dictionary. But you can hear about this flower in Thai songs in the Isan dialect:

“I really miss Isan, I miss the flowers of the dojang Tung Luilai.”

“Forest Flame”, “Forest Fire” - this is the name that the gray-colored dokjang flower is usually known by. What color would we use in Russian when describing this flower?

- one of the most beautiful natural phenomena. It can be found after rain, near waterfalls, near the banks of various reservoirs and in fog in sunny weather.

In order for it to appear, high humidity and a light source are necessary. In this case, the light source should be behind the observer, and the rays should fall on the drops at an angle of forty-two degrees.

It is under these conditions that light rays, passing through the transparent medium of droplets, break up into a color spectrum consisting of seven colors.

This is the range that the human eye can discern:

Red;
Orange;
Yellow;
Green;
Blue;
Blue;
Violet.

Surely from childhood, many of you remember a mnemonic verse for remembering the colors of the rainbow: “ TO every O hunter and wants h nah, G de With goes f adhan." Other mnemonics about the rainbow also have a right to exist:

The mole stroked the sheep and the giraffe and the bunny;
How Jacques the bell-ringer once broke a lantern with his head;
Every designer wants to know where to download Photoshop.

Read about how to easily memorize poetry

Thanks to these word combinations, we have clues for the first letters of each color. You can also come up with a mnemonic verse yourself, using your imagination. Well, in this article let's talk about easier and effective method remembering the colors of the rainbow - a method based on visualization.

We come up with images based on the colors of the rainbow

At the initial stage, think about what you associate each of these colors with. The selected images must be of the same color and must be clearly visualized.

For example:

Red - Kremlin Tower;
Orange - corn;
Yellow - banana;
Green - crocodile;
Blue – moon;
Blue - Avatar (from the film of the same name);
Violet - Cheshire Cat.

Serial connection of the resulting images

In order to connect our images, we will use one of the methods described below. Which one you prefer is up to you.

Chain method

Here we clearly connect images in the colors of the rainbow with each other, fixing the images with each other for 4-6 seconds. Connections should be as vivid and unusual as possible, and in general, memorable.

Example:

An orange is stuck on the top of the Kremlin tower, and an ear of corn grows from the orange. The corn, in turn, is gnawed by a crocodile and at the same time he sits on the Moon. The Avatar is holding the moon above him, and the Cheshire Cat is digging into his leg =)

To learn how to connect images correctly, watch my video:

The “Unusual Story” method

We connect the images into a ridiculous story, imagining how each previous image interacts with the next one.

Example:

The Kremlin tower grows an orange tree, on which ears of corn emerge from the oranges. Corn cobs hatch into little crocodiles that crawl on the moon. This Moon revolves around the Avatar, and the Avatar strokes Cheshire cat =)

The Pilot Method for remembering the colors of the rainbow

To use this method, create in your imagination a room or a city route with objects on which you will attach images with colors. Hold connections between images and locations for 4-6 seconds.

Example:

Pillar– the Kremlin Tower swings at the top of the pillar;
Lenin monument– there is an orange peel on the head of the monument;
Bench– there is corn growing on the bench and so on...

Also, as locations we can highlight "Microscope" method, and take the human body as an object. Since the rainbow has seven colors, and the human body can be divided into 7 parts of the body, this method can be very convenient for memorization.

Which method do you like best? Write about it in the comments below. Also, don’t forget to share materials about memory development with your friends and ask questions about this topic that interest you!!!

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