The origin of the word & color "purple" .... is a sea snail.

[taricha]

In ancient times, purple was a prized pigment and associated with royalty due to its beauty, expense, and difficulty to produce.
What I didn't know was that it came from sea snails we'd categorize in the family of murex snails.
RobWords video (13:26-14:18)


On the linguistic side, the snails were called "porphyra" by the ancient Greek, and the dye that they got from them was called purpura in Latin - which is easy to see how it gave rise to the word color in a number of languages:
english: purple
Czech: purpurový
Danish: purpur
Norwegian: purpurfarget
Polish: purpurowy
etc.

Wikipedia on this dye "Tyrian Purple" has that three species were used:
It is secreted by several species of predatory sea snails in the family Muricidae, rock snails originally known by the name Murex (Bolinus brandaris, Hexaplex trunculus and Stramonita haemastoma). In ancient times, extracting this dye involved tens of thousands of snails and substantial labour, and as a result, the dye was highly valued. The colored compound is 6,6'-dibromoindigo.

So be sure to dose plenty of Bromine to really make the purple "pop" in the secretions of your predatory snails, lol. (Don't actually do this.)

wikipedia photo of sample colors from the 3 snail species...

By Photograph: U.Name.MeDerivative work: TeKaBe - This file was derived from: Purple Purpur.jpg:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94992996

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Thank you for sharing! That is really interesting where that word comes from!