Word-color association from large-scale online data: Methodology and applications

Words and colors are intimately associated in humans, a sign of the close relationship between verbal, linguistic expression and cognition. Word-color association therefore plays an important role in areas of communication such as marketing and literature. Traditional efforts to build a general, scalable, and quantitative mapping of word-color association have often relied on surveys, experiencing difficulties in curating large-scale data sets, enrolling sufficient participants, and excising potential inherent researcher biases in the choice of the words and the colors to be mapped. Even the most recent computational efforts based on Large Language Models (LLMs) do not overcome these problems due to their near-complete lack of transparency in data and methodology that results in low confidence, consistency, and reliability. Here we propose a framework that overcomes these limitations via the use of freely accessible large-scale web image data, and fully transparent and reproducible methods that allow one to build color associations for almost any given word. We also showcase the methodology in action through analyses of color usage in corporate branding and 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. These show that our framework can help form new answers to and perspectives on long-standing questions in communication. Additionally, our framework by design can be readily adopted for use in any language supported by a web image search engine, and its code is freely available in open source; we therefore expect it to contribute towards achieving a universal, multilingual understanding of word-color association.