Robert Ridgway was a famous ornithologist who wrote an eight-volume work on The Birds of North and Middle America. (Three more volumes were completed by a colleague after his death.) He saw a need for standardized color naming in ornithology and other sciences that had to classify large quantities of natural specimens, and published a system for identifying and naming 1,115 colors in 1912.
Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature was not the first attempt to standardize colors. Taxonomies of 100 to 400 color names had been published through the 19th century and more rigorous systems based on spectrum analysis or color-wheel placement had used symbols or numbers to represent exact combinations of color features (hue, tone, light, shade, etc.). Ridgway's, however, was the first to provide such a finely divided color categorization that also used words from natural language, which, he argued, despite their imprecision, were more useful to naturalists.
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