The folks at Dolores Labs used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have folks identify a series of random colors. Then they made a color wheel with the data. It's fun to see the adjectives and odd names people came up with for certain colors. From a post by Brendan O'Connor who made the experiment, titled "Where Does 'Blue' End And 'Red' Begin?":
This study is basically the same design as the famous World Color Survey, where anthropologists showed color patches to speakers of many different languages and asked for names. Of course, we only have English speakers (most Turkers live in the U.S.). However, we can get much more data. (The... picture and links use only a small percentage of all the colors and names we collected.) There’s tons more that can be done. Want to make a better visualizer? Statistical analysis of colors to name terms? Let us know and we should be able to get this data set online.
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If I actually had some free time available right now, I would want to play with the data a bit. (It would be a fun way to learn a little R.)
Actually, Nathan Moroney at HP Labs has been collecting data like this for years. He has built some cool tools from it like:
Color Thesaurus
Color Zeitgeist
Link to the research project
Link to non-English color naming experiment
A variety of viewers with with differently-calibrated monitors under different lighting conditions sounds interesting from a human perception aspect. But for precise color, this problem has been solved with the Pantone Matching System.
Clients/customers saying things like "I want lightish aquamarine" is of little use. However, after a quick spin together through a PMS guide, we're both talking about the same, actual color and not an approximation on a monitor.
So, if your graphic designer mentions something about "PMS," it's a good thing.
In some ways, this is "Rashomon" in color.
Rick York