Language Matters | Purple reign: how colour owes its name to sea snails, and why it became associated with grandeur
- The name purple is derived from that of a sea snail, mucus from which was boiled down 3,500 years ago to produce a coveted purple-red fabric dye
- Since the process was time-consuming and labour-intensive, purple fabric was expensive and reserved for the Roman elite and later the Byzantine imperial court
The word “purple”, spelled purpel in Middle English, from purpul in Old English, was first recorded in Northumbrian, in the Lindisfarne Gospels.
This involved a dissimilation (changing one of two identical sounds to a different, similar one) of purpure, borrowed from the Latin purpura in the ninth century, coming from the Greek porphyra, which most likely had a Semitic origin.
Meaning “purple dye, a purple garment”, the word for the hue is in fact derived from and references the source of the pigment: the name of several species of predatory Mediterranean Sea snails whose mucus from one of their glands was extracted and boiled down.
The process of extracting this biological pigment for use as a fabric dye was first practised in the Phoenician city of Tyre as early as the 14th century BC – thus this colour is known as Tyrian purple. Some historians claim that the name Phoenicia derives from Greek phoinos, meaning “dark red”, referring to the dye.
Production of the pigment was time- and labour-intensive: “10,000 shellfish would produce 1 gram of dyestuff, and that would only dye the hem of a garment in a deep colour”, according to historian Béatrice Caseau.
Its striking purple-red hues and resistance to fading, combined with difficult production, made the pigment costly and desirable.