"impossible color" meaning in English

See impossible color in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: impossible colors [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} impossible color (plural impossible colors)
  1. A color that the human eye normally cannot see, but might seem to appear under rare conditions or due to visual illusions.
    Sense id: en-impossible_color-en-noun-6-yDJMKp Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, Perception

Inflected forms

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "impossible colors",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "impossible color (plural impossible colors)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
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          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
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          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Perception",
          "orig": "en:Perception",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
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      "examples": [
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          "bold_text_offsets": [
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          ],
          "ref": "2024 September 24, Tyler Thrasher, Terry Mudge, The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature, Sasquatch Books, →ISBN, page 228:",
          "text": "If you're still with us, there is one last impossible color we’d like to share. Imaginary colors are those that mathematically exist, sure, but we’ll never see them.",
          "type": "quotation"
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          ],
          "ref": "2025 May 6, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, “2: An Archive of Impossible Objects”, in Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, MIT Press, →ISBN:",
          "text": "Self-luminous red, reddish green, stygian blue, and hyperbolic orange are all examples of impossible colors, a category that also includes chimerical, forbidden, imaginary, nonrealizable, and nonphysical colors. … There are two main categories of impossible color: those that lie just beyond human perception and are impossible to see, but exist, and those that do not exist physically, but we can \"see\" in the mind.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A color that the human eye normally cannot see, but might seem to appear under rare conditions or due to visual illusions."
      ],
      "id": "en-impossible_color-en-noun-6-yDJMKp",
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        ],
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          "illusion",
          "illusion"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "impossible color"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "impossible colors",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "impossible color (plural impossible colors)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  "senses": [
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        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
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        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
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        "Pages with entries",
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          "ref": "2024 September 24, Tyler Thrasher, Terry Mudge, The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature, Sasquatch Books, →ISBN, page 228:",
          "text": "If you're still with us, there is one last impossible color we’d like to share. Imaginary colors are those that mathematically exist, sure, but we’ll never see them.",
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          "ref": "2025 May 6, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, “2: An Archive of Impossible Objects”, in Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination, MIT Press, →ISBN:",
          "text": "Self-luminous red, reddish green, stygian blue, and hyperbolic orange are all examples of impossible colors, a category that also includes chimerical, forbidden, imaginary, nonrealizable, and nonphysical colors. … There are two main categories of impossible color: those that lie just beyond human perception and are impossible to see, but exist, and those that do not exist physically, but we can \"see\" in the mind.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A color that the human eye normally cannot see, but might seem to appear under rare conditions or due to visual illusions."
      ],
      "links": [
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      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "impossible color"
}

Download raw JSONL data for impossible color meaning in English (2.0kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-03-25 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-03-03 using wiktextract (05c257f and 9d9a410). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.