How many colors does the rainbow have? It seems like everyone has known for a long time that it has seven colors. But as it turns out, it’s not all that simple.

Isaac Newton was the first to identify seven colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue and purple. But he added orange and dark blue later, originally his spectrum contained only five colors.

Some European countries (such as Germany and France) count six colors in the rainbow. The Japanese have excluded green from the spectrum, but the British and Americans don’t distinguish between blue and dark blue. The Chinese see five colors in the rainbow, and in some Muslim countries they think that there are only four colors in the rainbow: red, yellow, green and dark blue, and each of them symbolizes its natural element. But the leaders of our list are some African tribes for whom there are only two colors in the rainbow: dark and light.

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