The World Color Survey

• (1) the existence of universal constraints on cross-language color naming, and
• (2) the existence of a partially fixed evolutionary progression according to which languages gain color terms over time.

Original support came from the National Science Foundation. Additional support has been received from the University of California at Berkeley, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94707), the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and three additional grants from the National Science Foundation.

In the early 2000s, the WCS data were digitized and web-posted as a publicly available resource. They have been widely used since then.