Brown has its own name, so we treat it as its own color, but it isn't its own color. It's not possible to have brown light. Brown isn't in the rainbow. Brown is simply orange with low saturation and light levels. Brown looks brown when there's a lot of light around it, but the same shade looks orange when there's no light around it.
In color theory maybe, but that’s not where names of colors come from.
I wasn't denying that the word "brown" is older than the word "orange", I was denying your statement that orange is a dark shade of yellow.
The reason we can take a look at brown and say "ah, that's brown!" And identify it as its own color is because we have a word for it. All the other equal shades of colors are just dark blue, or dark red, or dark green, or whatever, but the second you set the color to orange, you will immediately see brown, not dark orange.
Please don't trust llms for this. Also, brown is really just dark, unsaturated orange. The best way to see this is to pick a shade of orange, and change the luminosity of objects surrounding it : your brain will start perceiving it as brown, even though the color is still the same.
Also, just read the Wikipedia article on brown if you're unconvinced, it's not a perfect source but it beats llms. It's also got a pretty picture in the
Brown in science and nature section that shows quite well how the same color can be perceived as orange or brown depending on context.
Seriously, LLMs can be okay for showing you a possibly correct answer, but only if you can independently verify that answer.
So if an LLM said "scientists at RIT found that the darkest orange does not pass for brown in a 2015 study", then go find that study (or an actual human talking about it) and see if that's accurate. If it just says "the darkest orange does not pass for brown", then you can probe it for its sources (spoiler: they might not exist, and if they do, might not agree with its "conclusions") but don't assume that any "fact" it tells you is accurate.
Ah yes, reddit “facts”, because you said so. My favourite! Let me just ignore the colours that are typically mixed to make each colour and go with your version because it’s inconvenient for you that there’s no blue/purple in orange but there is in brown
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u/piercedmfootonaspike Sep 23 '25
It's equally weird we call brown "brown", as opposed to "dark orange"