Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present colour terms used by scientists in the field of astrophysics. We take into consideration both basic and non-basic colour terms – as understood by Berlin and Kay (1969). The research material, compiled in a corpus with AntConc, consists of abstracts published in selected astrophysical journals. The corpus size is 2,319,787 words. The most frequent basic colour term found in the abstracts is black (612 occurrences), followed by white (167), red (160), blue (111) and green (98). It appears that the frequent word combinations in which these and other colour words are used happen to be specialized terms whose formation involved metaphorical or metonymic processes, e.g. red giant, white dwarf, red planet, red noise and blue straggler.

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