Taupe colors fall into a range from dark
tan to grayish brown or brownish gray. The word derives from the French noun , which in turn is from the
Latin , both meaning "
mole" (the mammal). The name originally referred only to the average
color of the
French mole, but (as in the case of the colors
pink and
lavender), beginning in the 1940s, its usage expanded to encompass a wider range of shades. Taupe is a vague color term which may refer to almost any grayish-brown, brownish-gray, or warm gray color. It often overlaps with tan and even people who use color professionally (such as
designers and
artists) frequently disagree as to what "taupe" means. Taupe itself, however, is not directly correlated with such colors as purple or pink. There is no single, generally recognized authority for such terms, but the addition of such colors can create a wider variety of shades which can benefit either art. When viewed on a precisely calibrated monitor, the color displayed adjacent matches the color sample called
taupe referenced in the 1930 book
A Dictionary of Color, the world standard for color terms before the invention of
computers. However, the word
taupe may often be used to refer to lighter shades of taupe today, and therefore another name for this color is
dark taupe. According to the
Dictionary of Color, the first use of "taupe" as a color name in English was in the early 19th century, but the earliest citation recorded by the
Oxford English Dictionary is from 1911. The
normalized color coordinates for taupe are identical to
dark lava, which was formalized as a color name in the
ISCC–NBS system in 1955. ==Variations of taupe==