Mauve is a pale purple — not a deep royal purple, and not quite pink. It sits in that soft space between lilac and pink, a little dusty, a little grey. We use it for the colour itself and for things of that colour: a mauve dress, mauve flowers. The English word was borrowed from French mauve, which is also the name of the mallow flower; those flowers can wear just this kind of purple, and mallow is in fact the same old word in another shape. Though actually, the colour name took off in a very modern way: in 1856 a young chemist, William Henry Perkin, was trying to make a medicine and accidentally made a purple dye from coal tar — the first of the aniline dyes. He called that dye mauve, and suddenly the colour was in fashion in a way a flower name had never been. So when you see mauve on a paint chart, you are looking at a word that is part flower, part factory.