Languages and Linguistics

My students, juniors and seniors in HS in TX, mostly just use "purple."

But you also have to consider background knowledge. So while most of the kids just use "purple," they also have a limited number of color terms at their disposal. Red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple are about it. Maybe "turquoise" or some other item-specific color terms. With 'gold' and 'silver' and then composite "blue-green" or "red-orange". When they hear "aqua" or "teal" or "magenta" or "umber" they either hear "zzzz" and assume that it's some unimportant something or, if they have some passing familiarity with the word, translate it to simpler terms. "Light blue," "dark blue-green" or "bright pinkish-red" or "dark green-brown".

Now, the kids that are in art or design they have mastery of a wide range of color terms. Note that in English the acquisition of color terms historically has been rather late. I mean, "orange" as a basic color term only came about when oranges became not that uncommon. Until then light orange was yellow and dark orange was just red or "light red" or "yellow red". Large literature on color terms in the linguist's library.

Knowing the things behind the color helps. If you are familiar with violets then "violet" is an okay color term. So my kids know that a violet is a kind of flower, or most do, but ask them to describe one and they can't. It's like "saffron" or, um, "teal"--one's from a spice and the other's from a bird. (But in this is like knowing the words for different lathe tool shapes--had a gig where the differences were important and those who hadn't used lathes and shaped their own tools were out to sea and needed a tutorial.)