Chromatic characteristics of acid colour

The research object is the term acid, which used to describe the colour in the Russian language as a description, clarifying the colour characteristics and not pointing to a certain tone, but recently has been increasingly used as an autonomous word. The subject of the study is the chromatic image of the colour name acid. The research goal is to continue the tradition of the psycholinguistic description of the system of colour naming in the Russian language, to define the significative and denotative structure of the colour name acid and to conduct a graphical analysis of the obtained data using similarity matrices and structural schemes. The method of research is a psycholinguistic experiment, that allowed us to match the term with the colour scales CIELAB and Munsell. The study involved 100 Russian speakers (20 males and 80 females) aged from 19 to 22 years (with a mean age of 20 years). The procedure of the experiment included two stages. At the first stage, the subjects were asked to explain the meaning of the new colour name, on the second stage they had to match the concept with the Color-Aid colour samples. On the basis of the obtained data, we determined the significative and denotative structure of the colour name. We revealed that the key role in the classification of the colour as acid play, on the one hand, its chromatic identification — belonging to a strictly defined, orange–yellow–green part of the colour spectrum, on the other hand — its saturation, brilliance and intensity. According to the results of the analysis, carried out using computer programs and descriptive statistics, the term acid has a rather high degree of formation of colour semantics. It can be considered as a social variant of a colour name and might be recommended to adding in this meaning into dictionaries.