pink

\ \ English has three distinct words pink. The colour term [18] appears to have come, by a bizarre series of twists, from an early Dutch word meaning ‘small’. This was pinck (source also of the colloquial English pinkie ‘little finger’ [19]). It was used in the phrase pinck oogen, literally ‘small eyes’, hence ‘half-closed eyes’, which was borrowed into English and partially translated as pink eyes. It has been speculated that this was a name given to a plant of the species Dianthus, which first emerged in the abbreviated form pink in the 16th century.

\ \ Many of these plants have pale red flowers, and so by the 18th century pink was being used for ‘pale red’. Pink ‘pierce’ [14], now preserved mainly in pinking shears, is probably of Low German origin (Low German has pinken ‘peck’). And pink (of an engine) ‘make knocking sounds’ [20] is presumably imitative in origin.