A color term, also known as a color name, is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color. The color term may refer to human perception of that color (which is affected by visual context), or to an underlying physical property (such as a specific wavelength of visible light). There are also numerical systems of color specification, referred to as color spaces.

Monolexemic color words are composed of individual lexemes, such as "red", "brown", or "olive". Compound color words make use of adjectives (e.g. "light brown", "sea green") or multiple basic color words (e.g. "yellow-green").

There are many different dimensions by which color varies. For example, hue (shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet), saturation ("deep" vs. "pale"), and brightness or intensity make up the HSI color space. The adjective "fluorescent" in English refers to moderately high brightness with strong color saturation. Pastel refers to colors with high brightness and low saturation.

Some phenomena are due to related optical effects, but may or may not be described separately from the color name. These include gloss (high-gloss shades are sometimes described as "metallic"; this is also a distinguishing feature of gold and silver), iridescence or goniochromism (angle-dependent color), dichroism (two-color surfaces), and opacity (solid vs. translucent).

Person of color (plural: people of color; persons of color) is a term used, primarily in the United States, to describe all people who are not white. The term is meant to be inclusive among non-white groups, emphasizing common experiences of racism. People of color was introduced as a preferable replacement to both non-white and minority, which are also inclusive, because it frames the subject positively; non-white defines people in terms of what they are not (white), and minority frequently carries a subordinate connotation. Style guides for writing from American Heritage, the Stanford Graduate School of Business,Mount Holyoke College, recommend the term over these alternatives. It may also be used with other collective categories of people such as students of color, men of color and women of color.

The untranslated English term has also seen some limited usage among Germans of color, especially when stressing the postcolonial perspective, but so far has not found entrance into general German language and is not necessarily known by the general populace. Pessoa de cor (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˌdʒi ˈkoʁ]), mulher de cor, etc. are in common usage in Brazil, although it has a limited, mostly colloquial, usage. Nevertheless, most of Brazilians will understand it when referring to non-white persons^{[citation needed]}.