Various attempts have been made by Anglo-Saxonists to deal with the Old English colour vocabulary but the subject remains far from clear. In the present article I shall try to show some of the reasons why this is so and offer a re-interpretation of the Old English colour words as a system, treating the Anglo-Saxons simply as a standard ethnographic corpus of anthropological data and therefore amenable to the techniques applied to those present-day communities that are the concern of the anthropologist.