Years ago I read a book in which a woman was wearing a ‘harlequin’ dress. I assumed the dress had a multicoloured diamond pattern. Not so. While I was looking for something else, I chanced to find out that harlequin has been used as an alternative word for the colour chartruese since 1923. According to Answers.com, “The color has traditionally been known as harlequin because it was the color of the costume worn by jesters, and “harlequin” is a synonym for jester.” But why did it take till 1923 for chartreuse to acquire a medieval alias?

Another colour name I only discovered within the last year or so is eau-de-nil, meaning ‘water of the Nile’ - a pale, yellowish-greyish, impure green. I wish I’d known the word when I was writing The Etched City, because this is the colour of Gwynn’s eyes, and I took pains over finding words to describe them, settling on ‘waterish’ (thank you, E.R. Eddison) and ‘brine’, while ‘eau-de-nil’ was sitting there in the dictionary - but not the thesaurus - all undiscovered by me. Mind you, when you Google it, eau-de-nil seems to get used for anything from teal to aqua to khaki to eggshell blue, but I think the sound of it suggests the right sort of colour, and it has the perfect Art Nouveau/Edwardian connotations. Ah, well, next time…