Colour in society
School house and team colours
From the red, blue, green and yellow houses of an Indian school to a national cricket side, shared colours make a group.
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Wearing the same colour is one of the quickest ways to turn a crowd into a team. Schools sort pupils into houses with a colour each. Universities have colours, and so do clubs and nations. Some of these choices are a century or two old and began almost by accident. They now carry strong loyalties, and people do come to like their own side's colours more.
#002147Cambridge blue#A3C1ADTour yellow#FFE600India blue#1C6DD0Brazil yellow#FFDF00Dutch orange#FF6600
School houses
The house system comes from British boarding schools, where pupils lived in separate houses that competed at sport. Day schools copied the idea without the buildings, and it travelled across the British Empire. In India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Nigeria, Australia and elsewhere, schools still divide children into four houses, very often red, blue, green and yellow, named after leaders, rivers, mountains or virtues. Pupils wear a house badge or a coloured shirt for sports day. The point is to give every child a smaller group to belong to and compete for.
Sport
Coloured kit became necessary when organised team sport spread in the nineteenth century and spectators had to tell sides apart. Oxford's dark blue and Cambridge's light blue date from early boat races, and a player who represents either university is still awarded a blue. The Tour de France leader's yellow jersey, introduced in 1919, matched the yellow paper of the newspaper that ran the race. The Giro d'Italia's pink jersey has the same origin. Some sports keep their kit plain: Test cricket is played in white.
National colours
National sides do not always wear flag colours. The Netherlands play in orange for the royal House of Orange. Italy wear blue, the colour of the former royal House of Savoy. Brazil's yellow shirt was chosen in a newspaper design contest after the national team lost the 1950 World Cup final at home wearing white. New Zealand's rugby team are the All Blacks. India's cricketers have worn blue in limited-overs matches since coloured clothing came into the game, and supporters call them the Men in Blue. Australia's green and gold recall its national flower, the golden wattle.
Colours on this page
Also part of it, and being written: Orange.
Sources and further reading
- School colors on Wikipedia
- Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: How Caius Blue became the Cambridge colour
- University of Cambridge: Colour palette
- The Independent: State secondaries urged to bring back the house system
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.