Order in Spanish colour words: Evidence against linguistic relativity Ana R. Delgado* Universidad de Salamanca, Spain The hypothesis that the Berlin and Kay (1969) colour sequence would be replicated in Spanish colour-word usage has been corroborated on 131,028 colour words from a representative corpus (N = 188,975,000). The observed sequence of white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, grey and brown is highly consistent diachronically (through current and contemporary Spanish), synchronically (through various countries) and with the expected order. Considering the divergence of Spanish vocabularies among geographi- cal areas in the last centuries, the almost total agreement did not have a high prior probability under hypotheses of culturally arbitrary colour vocabularies. It is difcult to see how linguistic relativity could adequately account for such a robust result. The use of ordinal statistics and non-reactive measures to study cultural products constrained by epigenetic rules, such as colour vocabularies, is presented as an exercise of methodological consilience. The cultural patterns that people create and consume may reveal as much as or more about human psychology than the most carefully planned psychological experiments (Buss, 1999). This assumption is based on the tenet that the human mind is biased by innate operationsÐepigenetic rulesÐpredisposing people to consider the world in a certain way: We do not see the rainbow as a continuum of light wave frequency, but rather as a set of qualitatively different basic colours. The term consilience (Wilson, 1998) refers to long-separated ®elds of inquiry that come together and create new insights. Methodological consilience must be an important part of this process, given the enormous differences in techniques and tactics from one research area to another: Typically, culture has been studied by anthropologists, armed with a multitude of qualitative approaches, mostly unde®ned, while psychologists have mainly opted for an arsenal of quantitative methods, not always well matched to their substantive inquiries. Methodological consilience suggests that in order to understand how we see, compre- hend and name colours, data and techniques from neuroscience or psychophysics 81 British Journal of Psychology (2004), 95, 81–90 © 2004 The British Psychological Society www.bps.org.uk * Correspondence should be addressed to Ana R. Delgado, Departamento de Psicolog ´a Ba ´sica, Psicobiolog ´a y Metodolog ´a. Avda. de la Merced 109–131. 37005 Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: adelgado@usal.es).