Chocolate (color)

For other uses, see Chocolate (disambiguation).

Molten chocolate and a piece of a chocolate bar

The color chocolate is a tone of deep brown that resembles chocolate. At right is displayed the color traditionally called chocolate.

The first recorded use of chocolate as a color name in English was in 1737.^[1]

This color is a representation of the color of the most common type of chocolate, milk chocolate.

Etymology

The word chocolate entered the English language from Spanish.^[2] How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are multiple competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word "chocolātl", which many sources derived from the Nahuatl word "xocolātl" made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "ātl" meaning water or refreshment.^[2] However, as William Bright noted^[3] the word "chocolatl" does not occur in central Mexican colonial sources making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria^[4] gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water. More recently^[when?] Dakin and Wichmann derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from Eastern Nahuatl meaning "beaten drink".^[5] They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli".

Variations of chocolate

Cocoa brown (web color "chocolate") (light chocolate)

Chocolate is created from the cocoa bean. A cacao tree with cocoa bean fruit pods (which are filled with cocoa beans inside of them) in various stages of ripening

Cocoa Brown
— Color coordinates —
Hex triplet		#D2691E
RGBB	(r, g, b)	(210, 105, 30)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(25°, 86%, 82[6]%)
Source		X11
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

The web color called "chocolate" is displayed at right. This color is actually the color of the exterior of an unripe cocoa bean pod and is not the color of chocolate, a highly processed product, at all. The historical and traditional name for this color is cocoa brown.^[7]

The first recorded use of cocoa brown as a color name in English was in 1925.^[8]

This color may also be referred to as light chocolate.

Chocolate in human culture

Animals

• Dogs with a dark brown coat is considered as chocolate colored. The most common breed is the Labrador Retriever

A chocolate Labrador.

Geography

• The Chocolate Hills are located in the province of Bohol in the Philippines.
• The Chocolate Mountains are located in Imperial County and Riverside County in the Colorado Desert in Southern California, a region of California, in the United States.
• There are also the Chocolate Mountains in Arizona, in the United States.

Music

• The Chocolate Watch Band was a popular psychedelic music group during the Summer of Love. (See also the Strawberry Alarm Clock)
• Chocolate City is a 1975 album by the funk band Parliament. It has a theme of love of Washington, D.C., where the group was particularly popular.
• Chocolate Starfish were an Australian rock music group based in Melbourne, Australia, releasing a number of hits in the early 1990s, before disbanding in 1998.
• Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water is the third album by the Nu metal band Limp Bizkit, released on October 15, 2000 through Interscope Records.
• Hot Chocolate was a British band that was popular during the 1970s and 1980s and famous for their song "You Sexy Thing".

See also

• List of colors
• Vanilla (color)

References

1. ^ Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 192; Color Sample of Chocolate: Page 39 Plate 8 Color Sample H10 Note: the color shown above as "chocolate" matches the color sample in this book shown as "chocolate"
2. ^ ^{a b} "The American Heritage Dictionary". http://www.bartleby.com/61/68/C0316800.html. Retrieved 9 May 2009. ^{[dead link]}
3. ^ Campbell, Lyle. Quichean Linguistic Prehistory; University of California Publications in Linguistics No. 81. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p. 104. 
4. ^ Santamaria, Francisco. Diccionario de Mejicanismos. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa S. A.. pp. 412–413. 
5. ^ Dakin, Karen; Wichmann, Søren (2000). "Cacao and Chocolate: A Uto-Aztecan perspective". Ancient Mesoamerica 11: 55–75. doi:10.1017/S0956536100111058. 
6. ^ web.forret.com Color Conversion Tool set to hex code of color #D2691E (Cocoa brown}:
7. ^ Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Color Sample of Cocoa Brown: Page 53 Plate 15 Color Sample C11 Note: the color shown above as "cocoa brown" matches the color sample in this book shown as "cocoa brown".
8. ^ Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 193