Chromaticities

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A range of colors or shades as perceived in a given light source
2. the quality of color discerned from a specific spectral composition
3. variations in color attributes that define visual characteristics in different contexts

Etymology: "Chromaticities" is the plural of "chromaticity," which is a noun formed from "chromatic" with the suffix "-ity," the common English ending for abstract qualities (as in "ability" or "density"). The plural form treats each distinct chromatic quality as a countable item, so a single set of values describing a colour's hue and saturation is one chromaticity, while a collection of them is chromaticities. "Chromatic" itself comes from the Greek "khrōmatikos," meaning "of colour," from "khrōma," colour. Its sense was extended in English to music, where "chromatic" describes notes that move by semitones, and in optics and colour science, where it describes the properties of light and colour that a viewer perceives. Chromaticity inherited that technical sense of colour quality, and the plural now appears most often in colour-measurement and display technology, where it names the coordinates that specify how a colour looks under a given light.