Abstract: Color words belong to the main sensory words of human language,and they are the indispensable parts of language and culture of a nation.Their unique language function and broad cultural symbolic meaning reflect special color meaning and cultural tradition.Color words in different nations have different features,some of which,after being extended and converted,have become reverence and taboo words of colors.This difference is caused by different historical and cultural background as well as aesthetic psychology of different nations,and is established with the development of society and history,therefore it is a permanent cultural phenomenon.This paper,from the perspective of contrastive analysis of Chinese and western culture,analyzes the influence of culture on the symbolic meanings of color words.

Key words: color words, language and culture, symbolic meaning, color reverence, color taboo