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How Many Colors in a Rainbow

There are 7 colors of the rainbow. You can remember them because they spell out ROY G BIV. The first letter of the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and indigo.

Rainbows are commonly thought as having 7 colors. The colors in order are:

  1. Red
  2. Orange
  3. Yellow
  4. Green
  5. Blue
  6. Indigo
  7. Violet

However, indigo and violet are close enough on the color wheel to represent the secondary color resulting from the combination of primary colours red and blue. An alternate answer is 6 for cases in which either indigo or violet is omitted or both are replaced with the term “purple”.

If you are referring to how many colors in terms of big numbers, it’s pretty much infinity, but a smaller infinity than how many colors there are. For example, black, white, brown, and pink are not in the rainbow.





The colour pattern of a rainbow is different from a spectrum, and the colours are less saturated. There is spectral smearing in a rainbow due to the fact that for any particular wavelength, there is a distribution of exit angles, rather than a single unvarying angle. In addition, a rainbow is a blurred version of the bow obtained from a point source, because the disk diameter of the sun (0.5°) cannot be neglected compared to the width of a rainbow (2°). The number of colour bands of a rainbow may therefore be different from the number of bands in a spectrum, especially if the droplets are either large or small. Therefore, the number of colours of a rainbow is variable. If, however, the word rainbow is used inaccurately to mean spectrum, it is the number of primary colours in the spectrum.


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