I seem to remember Jane Austen describing some item of apparel as being "cocliquot" in colour - which I later found out to be a sort of orangey-red colour. I also remember Frances Burney having Evelina looking at something with a bizarre name in French - something like "sigh of violets" or "crush of lilacs" that was a pale shade of lavender-grey.

Hunt though I might, I can't see where I got these references from. These days we seem to stick with fairly simple colour names, like dark red or pale blue. Occasionally we might use words like magenta or carmine or turquoise. In an age without accurate colour printing, were there a larger number of colour adjectives used, say, to accompany fashion plates or to describe colour in the newspapers?

My question is, were there lots of other names for colours that are now lost to us? Or are the two mentioned above French and used by Regency women who read French fashion journals?

(Also - does anyone with a better memory than mine (not difficult) know where in Evelina or Jane Austen's writings I got these two colour references from?)