FACT: Poke is the new pink

More than just good fashion sense, the colour called pink was named after an almost forgotten real-world meaning of the word.

Pink began its life as a verb. To pink, circa 1307, means to poke, stab or make holes in something. The latin ancestry may lead to the word pungere, meaning to pierce. Another branch of that became pungent, meaning sharp, which now seems to be used only in the figurative sense referring to “sharp” odours.

So too the word pink seems to be disconnected from the source. It made the jump to becoming a colour thanks to a flower. Dianthus is a family of 300 flower species that are commonly called Pinks. One such species, Dianthus caryophyllus, is called the Clove Pink or more often a Carnation.

Many of the Dianthus petals have perforations and ragged edges, and are often coloured in the neighbourhood of purple and (what we now call) pink. The written word “pink-coloured” is first recorded in 1681, and as time wears away all protuberances, pink-coloured becamed simply pink, the colour.

The original meaning of pink, or at least its spirit, can still be found in the name for pinking shears, a specific sort of scissors used to cut fabric in a zig-zag pattern. The benefit of that is that it makes the fabric less likely to fray, as there are no single threads runing along the entire edge. Any loose thread would be contained to a single zig or zag.

• Source: Pink – Online Etymology Dictionary

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