Maroon

Maroon (US & UK /məˈruːn/ mə-ROON,Australia /məˈroʊn/ mə-RONE) is a dark brownish red which takes its name from the French word marron, or chestnut.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "a brownish crimson or claret color."

In the RGB model used to create colors on computer screens and televisions, maroon is created by turning down the brightness of pure red to about one half.

Etymology

Maroon is derived from French marron ("chestnut"), itself from the Italian marrone, from the medieval Greek maraon.

The first recorded use of maroon as a color name in English was in 1789.

Bright maroon

Displayed on the right is the bright tone of maroon that was designated as maroon in Crayola crayons beginning in 1949.

It is a bright medium shade of maroon halfway between brown and rose.

The color halfway between brown and rose is crimson, so this color is also a tone of crimson.

Rich maroon (maroon (X11))

Displayed on the right is the color rich maroon, i.e. maroon as defined in the X11 color names, which is much brighter and more toned toward rose than the HTML/CSS maroon shown above.

Color

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space colors can be identified numerically by their coordinates.

Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).