The following etymology of the word "pink" comes courtesy of The Word Detective, which has been offering witty, insightful commentary on word origins for the past ten years.
"Pink" is a very strange word, so strange that one usually staid
dictionary of etymology calls its evolution "a bizarre series of twists."
In the beginning, there was the old Dutch word "pinck," meaning "small."
The little finger is known in Dutch today as the "pink," which is indeed the
source of our modern "pinkie" finger, but bear with me for a moment because
there were some fairly odd steps 'twixt this Dutch "pink" and "pinkie."
The Dutch "pinck" was adopted into Scots (the language of Scotland)
sometime in the 16th century in the general sense of "small." Scots also
imported the Dutch phrase "pinck oogen," meaning "tiny eyes" or "half-closed
eyes." This in turn became the Scots and English phrase "pink eye," which
is now a colloquial name for conjunctivitis (an inflammation of the eye),
but which originally meant "half-closed or squinting eye."
By now you're probably wondering what all these eyes have to do with the
light reddish color we call "pink." A certain flower of the species of
Dianthus was known as "pink eye" (or "pink" for short) because it was
thought to resemble a half-closed eye. This flower was usually, you guessed
it, the color we now know as "pink," and by the early 18th century "pink"
had come into use as the name of the color itself. So the "color" pink
comes from an old Dutch phrase meaning "squinting eye," which is pretty
bizarre in my book.
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