Amber (color)
color term midway between the colors of gold and orange
The color amber is a pure chroma color, located on the color wheel midway between the colors of yellow and orange. The color name is derived from the material also known as amber, which is commonly found in a range of yellow-orange-brown-red colors; likewise, as a color, amber can refer to a range of yellow-orange colors. In English, the first recorded use of the term as a color name, rather than a reference to the specific substance, was in 1500.
SAE/ECE amber
Amber is one of several technically defined colors used in automotive signal lamps. In North America, SAE standard J578 governs the colorimetry of vehicle lights, while outside North America the internationalized European ECE regulations hold force. Both standards designate a range of orange-yellow hues in the CIE color space as "amber".
In the past, the ECE amber definition was more restrictive than the SAE definition, but the current ECE definition is identical to the more permissive SAE standard. The SAE formally uses the term "yellow amber", though the color is most often referred to as "yellow". This is not the same as selective yellow, a color used in some fog lamps and headlamps.
Formal definitions
Previously, ECE amber was defined according to the 1968 Convention on Road Traffic, as follows:
Recent revisions to the ECE regulations have aligned ECE Amber with SAE Yellow, defined as follows:
The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries.
“Amber (color)” enters the record as color term midway between the colors of gold and orange. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Amber, color and term can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q679355. The first chronological checks are 1500 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amber (color)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.