Oprah Winfrey Film Did Oprah star in any films? In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple as distraught housewife Sofia. Was this an award winning film by chance? She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. Was she in any other films in her career? In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based on Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Did she do any voice rolls in the films or did she always perform? Oprah voiced Gussie the goose in Charlotte's Web (2006) and voiced Judge Bumbleton in Bee Movie (2007), Did she receive an award for this movie? I don't know. Was there any other films she performed in? In 2018, Winfrey starred as Mrs. Which in the film adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time. How long was her career in filming? I don't know.
When did she perform in the color purple?
When did Oprah perform in the color purple?
In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple as distraught housewife Sofia. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The Alice Walker novel went on to become a Broadway musical which opened in late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based on Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods. Despite major advertising, including two episodes of her talk show dedicated solely to the film, and moderate to good critical reviews, Beloved opened to poor box-office results, losing approximately $30 million. While promoting the movie, co-star Thandie Newton described Winfrey as "a very strong technical actress and it's because she's so smart. She's acute. She's got a mind like a razor blade." In 2005, Harpo Productions released a film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The made-for-television film was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role.  In late 2008, Winfrey's company Harpo Films signed an exclusive output pact to develop and produce scripted series, documentaries, and movies for HBO.  Oprah voiced Gussie the goose in Charlotte's Web (2006) and voiced Judge Bumbleton in Bee Movie (2007), co-starring the voices of Jerry Seinfeld and Renee Zellweger. In 2009, Winfrey provided the voice for the character of Eudora, the mother of Princess Tiana, in Disney's The Princess and the Frog and in 2010, narrated the US version of the BBC nature program Life for Discovery.  In 2018, Winfrey starred as Mrs. Which in the film adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time. CANNOTANSWER
In 1985,
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born  Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media," she was the richest African-American of the 20th century, was once the world's only black billionaire, and the greatest black philanthropist in U.S. history. By 2007, she was sometimes ranked as the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single teenage mother and later raised in inner-city Milwaukee. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teenage years and became pregnant at 14; her son was born prematurely and died in infancy. Winfrey was then sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber in Nashville, Tennessee, and landed a job in radio while still in high school. By 19, she was a co-anchor for the local evening news. Winfrey's often emotional, extemporaneous delivery eventually led to her transfer to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company.

By the mid-1990s, Winfrey had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, mindfulness, and spirituality. Though she has been criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and having an emotion-centered approach, she has also been praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. Winfrey had also emerged as a political force in the 2008 presidential race, with her endorsement of Barack Obama estimated to have been worth about one million votes during the 2008 Democratic primaries. In 2013, Winfrey was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and received honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard. In 2008, she formed her own network, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

Credited with creating a more intimate, confessional form of media communication, Winfrey popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Winfrey has won many accolades throughout her career which includes 18 Daytime Emmy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Chairman's Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, including the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, a Tony Award, a Peabody Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, awarded by the Academy Awards and two additional Academy Award nominations. Winfey was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Early life
Orpah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954; her first name was spelled Orpah on her birth certificate after the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth, but people mispronounced it regularly and "Oprah" stuck. She was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to an unmarried teenage mother. Her mother, Vernita Lee (1935–2018), was a housemaid. Winfrey's biological father is usually noted as Vernon Winfrey (born c. 1933), a coal miner turned barber turned city councilman who had been in the Armed Forces when she was born. However, Mississippi farmer and World War II Veteran Noah Robinson Sr. (born c. 1925) has claimed to be her biological father. A genetic test in 2006 determined that her matrilineal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia. Her genetic makeup was determined to be 89% Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, and 3% East Asian. However, given the imprecision of genetic testing, the East Asian markers may actually be Native American.

After Winfrey's birth, her mother traveled north, and Winfrey spent her first six years living in rural poverty with her maternal grandmother, Hattie Mae (Presley) Lee (April 15, 1900 – February 27, 1963). Her grandmother was so poor that Winfrey often wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which other children made fun of her. Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed "The Preacher" for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother was reportedly abusive.

At age six, Winfrey moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her mother, who was less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother had been, largely as a result of the long hours she worked as a maid. Around this time, Lee had given birth to another daughter, Winfrey's younger half-sister, Patricia who died of causes related to cocaine addiction in February 2003 at age 43. By 1962, Lee was having difficulty raising both daughters, so Winfrey was temporarily sent to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee. While Winfrey was in Nashville, Lee gave birth to a third daughter, who was put up for adoption in the hopes of easing the financial straits that had led to Lee's being on welfare, and was later also named Patricia. Winfrey did not know that she had a second half-sister until 2010. By the time Winfrey moved back with her mother, Lee had also given birth to Winfrey's half-brother Jeffrey, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989. At the age of 8, she was baptized in a Baptist church.

Winfrey has stated she was molested by her cousin, uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first announced on a 1986 episode of her TV show regarding sexual abuse. When Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, they reportedly refused to believe her account. Winfrey once commented that she had chosen not to be a mother because she had not been mothered well. At 13, after suffering what she described as years of abuse, Winfrey ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant, but her son was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. Winfrey later stated she felt betrayed by the family member who had sold the story of her son to the National Enquirer in 1990.

Winfrey attended Lincoln High School in Milwaukee, but after early success in the Upward Bound program, was transferred to the affluent suburban Nicolet High School. Upon transferring, she said she was continually reminded of her poverty as she rode the bus to school with fellow African-Americans, some of whom were servants of her classmates' families. She began to rebel and steal money from her mother in an effort to keep up with her free-spending peers. As a result, her mother once again sent her to live with Vernon in Nashville, although this time she did not take her back. Vernon was strict but encouraging, and made her education a priority. Winfrey became an honors student, was voted Most Popular Girl, and joined her high school speech team at East Nashville High School, placing second in the nation in dramatic interpretation.

Winfrey's first job as a teenager was working at a local grocery store. At the age of 17, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant. She also attracted the attention of the local black radio station, WVOL, which hired her to do the news part-time. She worked there during her senior year of high school and in her first two years of college. She had won an oratory contest, which secured her a full scholarship to Tennessee State University, a historically black institution, where she studied communication. However, she did not deliver her final paper and receive her degree until 1987, by which time she was a successful television personality.

Winfrey's career in media would not have surprised her grandmother, who once said that ever since Winfrey could talk, she was on stage. As a child, she played games interviewing her corncob doll and the crows on the fence of her family's property. Winfrey later acknowledged her grandmother's influence, saying it was Hattie Mae who had encouraged her to speak in public and "gave me a positive sense of myself".

Television

Working in local media, Winfrey was both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-TV (now WTVF-TV), where she often covered the same stories as John Tesh, who worked at a competing Nashville station. In 1976, she moved to Baltimore's WJZ-TV to co-anchor the six o'clock news. In 1977, she was removed as co-anchor and worked in lower profile positions at the station. She was then recruited to join Richard Sher as co-host of WJZ's local talk show People Are Talking, which premiered on August 14, 1978. She also hosted the local version of Dialing for Dollars.

In 1984, Winfrey relocated to Chicago to host WLS-TV's low-rated half-hour morning talk show, AM Chicago. The first episode aired on January 2, 1985. Within months after Winfrey took over, the show went from last place in the ratings to overtaking Donahue as the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. The movie critic Roger Ebert persuaded her to sign a syndication deal with King World. Ebert predicted that she would generate 40 times as much revenue as his television show, At the Movies. It was then renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show and expanded to a full hour. The first episode was broadcast nationwide on September 8, 1986. Winfrey's syndicated show brought in double Donahue's national audience, displacing Donahue as the number-one daytime talk show in America. Their much-publicized contest was the subject of enormous scrutiny. According to Time magazine in August 1988:

TV columnist Howard Rosenberg said: "She's a roundhouse, a full course meal, big, brassy, loud, aggressive, hyper, laughable, lovable, soulful, tender, low-down, earthy, and hungry. And she may know the way to Phil Donahue's jugular." Newsdays Les Payne observed, "Oprah Winfrey is sharper than Donahue, wittier, more genuine, and far better attuned to her audience, if not the world" and Martha Bayles of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "It's a relief to see a gab-monger with a fond but realistic assessment of her own cultural and religious roots."

In the early years of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the program was classified as a tabloid talk show. In the mid-1990s, Winfrey began to host shows on broader topics such as heart disease, geopolitics, spirituality, and meditation. She interviewed celebrities on social issues they were directly involved with, such as cancer, charity work, or substance abuse, and hosted televised giveaways. The later years of the show faced accusations that Winfrey was promoting junk science. This has manifested as criticisms of Winfrey for promoting particular guests whose medical commentaries (both on her show and in the wider media) frequently lack supporting science. Common targets of this criticism include Dr. Oz's promotion of various "miracle pills" (especially those aimed at weight loss), Dr. Phil, Jenny McCarthy's unfounded assertions about vaccines, and Suzanne Somers's promotion of bioidenticals. Multiple publications have called on Oprah to denounce medical statements made by her former proteges long after her show ended. For example, there were calls for her to denounce Dr. Oz in 2020 reaction to his comments about coronavirus and his promotion of a poorly vetted drug as a cure.

In addition to her talk show, Winfrey also produced and co-starred in the drama miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989) and its short-lived spin-off, Brewster Place. As well as hosting and appearing on television shows, Winfrey co-founded the women's cable television network Oxygen which was the initial network for her Oprah After the Show program from 2002 to 2006 before moving to Oprah.com when Winfrey sold her stake in the network. She is also the president of Harpo Productions (Oprah spelled backwards), a film and TV production company behind The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, The Dr. Oz Show and many others. She also moderated three ABC Afterschool Specials from 1992 to 1994.

On January 15, 2008, Winfrey and Discovery Communications announced plans to change Discovery Health Channel into a new channel called OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. It was scheduled to launch in 2009 but was delayed, and actually launched on January 1, 2011.

The series finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show aired on May 25, 2011.

In January 2017, CBS announced that Winfrey would join 60 Minutes as a special contributor on the Sunday evening news magazine program starting in September 2017. The National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2018 opened a special exhibit on Winfrey's cultural influence through television. Winfrey left 60 Minutes by the end of 2018.

In June 2018, Apple announced a multi-year content partnership with Winfrey, in which it was agreed that Winfrey would create new original programs exclusively for Apple's streaming service, Apple TV+. The first show under the deal, Oprah's Book Club, premiered on November 1, 2019. Oprah's Book Club is based on the segment of the same name from The Oprah Winfrey Show. The second show under the deal, Oprah Talks COVID-19, debuted on March 21, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. A third show, The Oprah Conversation debuted on July 30, 2020, with Winfrey "[continuing] to explore impactful and relevant topics with fascinating thought leaders from all over the world".

Celebrity interviews
In 1993, Winfrey hosted a rare prime-time interview with Michael Jackson, which became the fourth most-watched event in American television history as well as the most watched interview ever, with an audience of 36.5 million. On December 1, 2005, Winfrey appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman for the first time in 16 years, to promote the new Broadway musical, The Color Purple,<ref name=oprlet> Time (magazine)]</ref> which she produced. The episode was hailed by some as the "television event of the decade" and helped Letterman attract his largest audience in more than 11 years: 13.45 million viewers. Although a much-rumored feud was said to have been the cause of the rift, both Winfrey and Letterman balked at such talk. "I want you to know, it's really over, whatever you thought was happening," said Winfrey. On September 10, 2007, Letterman made his first appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as its season premiere was filmed in New York City.

In 2006, rappers Ludacris, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube criticized Winfrey for what they perceived as an anti-hip hop bias. In an interview with GQ magazine, Ludacris said that Winfrey gave him a "hard time" about his lyrics, and edited comments he made during an appearance on her show with the cast of the film Crash. He also said that he wasn't initially invited on the show with the rest of the cast. Winfrey responded by saying that she is opposed to rap lyrics that "marginalize women," but enjoys some artists, including Kanye West, who appeared on her show. She said she spoke with Ludacris backstage after his appearance to explain her position and said she understood that his music was for entertainment purposes, but that some of his listeners might take it literally. In September 2008, Winfrey received criticism after Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report reported that Winfrey refused to have Sarah Palin on her show, allegedly because of Winfrey's support for Barack Obama. Winfrey denied the report, maintaining that there never was a discussion regarding Palin's appearing on her show. She said that after she made public her support for Obama, she decided that she would not let her show be used as a platform for any of the candidates. Although Obama appeared twice on her show, those appearances were prior to his declaration as a presidential candidate. Winfrey added that Palin would make a fantastic guest and that she would love to have her on the show after the election, which she did on November 18, 2009.

In 2009, Winfrey was criticized for allowing actress Suzanne Somers to appear on her show to discuss hormone treatments that are not accepted by mainstream medicine. Critics have also suggested that Winfrey is not tough enough when questioning celebrity guests or politicians whom she appears to like. Lisa de Moraes, a media columnist for The Washington Post, stated: "Oprah doesn't do follow-up questions unless you're an author who's embarrassed her by fabricating portions of a supposed memoir she's plugged for her book club."

In 2021, she conducted an interview with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and her husband Prince Harry, which was broadcast globally and received international media attention.

Other media

Film
Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), as distraught housewife Sofia. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The Alice Walker novel later became a Broadway musical which opened in late 2005, with Winfrey credited as a producer. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based on Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name. To prepare for her role as Sethe, the protagonist and former slave, Winfrey experienced a 24-hour simulation of the experience of slavery, which included being tied up and blindfolded and left alone in the woods. Despite major advertising, including two episodes of her talk show dedicated solely to the film, and moderate to good critical reviews, Beloved opened to poor box-office results, losing approximately $30 million. While promoting the movie, co-star Thandie Newton described Winfrey as "a very strong technical actress and it's because she's so smart. She's acute. She's got a mind like a razor blade." Harpo Productions released a film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 2005. The made-for-television film was based upon a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and starred Halle Berry in the lead female role.

In late 2008, Winfrey's company Harpo Films signed an exclusive output pact to develop and produce scripted series, documentaries, and movies exclusively for HBO.

Oprah voiced Gussie the goose in Charlotte's Web (2006) and voiced Judge Bumbleton in Bee Movie (2007), co-starring the voices of Jerry Seinfeld and Renée Zellweger. In 2009, Winfrey provided the voice for the character of Eudora, the mother of Princess Tiana, in Disney's The Princess and the Frog and in 2010, narrated the US version of the BBC nature program Life for Discovery.

In 2018, Winfrey starred as Mrs. Which in the film adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time. She also lent her voice to an animated virtual-reality short film written and directed by Eric Darnell, starring John Legend, titled Crow: The Legend, telling a native American origin tale.

Publishing and writing
Winfrey has co-authored five books. At the announcement of a weight-loss book in 2005, co-authored with her personal trainer Bob Greene, it was said that her undisclosed advance fee had broken the record for the world's highest book advance fee, previously held by the autobiography of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 2015, her memoir, The Life You Want, was announced following on her tour of the same name, and scheduled for publication in 2017, but was "indefinitely postponed" in 2016.

Winfrey publishes the magazine: O, The Oprah Magazine and from 2004 to 2008 also published a magazine called O At Home. In 2002, Fortune called O, the Oprah Magazine the most successful start-up ever in the industry. Although its circulation had declined by more than 10 percent (to 2.4 million) from 2005 to 2008. The January 2009 issue was the best selling issue since 2006. The audience for her magazine is considerably more upscale than for her TV show; the average reader earns well above the median for U.S. women. In July 2020, it was announced that O Magazine would end its regular print publications after the December 2020 issue. In the December 2020 issue, Winfrey thanked readers and acknowledged it was the magazine's "final monthly print edition".

Online
Winfrey's company created the Oprah.com website to provide resources and interactive content related to her shows, magazines, book club, and public charity. Oprah.com averages more than 70 million page views and more than six million users per month, and receives approximately 20,000 e-mails each week. Winfrey initiated "Oprah's Child Predator Watch List," through her show and website, to help track down accused child molesters. Within the first 48 hours, two of the featured men were captured.

Radio
On February 9, 2006, it was announced that Winfrey had signed a three-year, $55-million contract with XM Satellite Radio to establish a new radio channel. The channel, Oprah Radio, features popular contributors to The Oprah Winfrey Show and O, The Oprah Magazine including Nate Berkus, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Bob Greene, Dr. Robin Smith, and Marianne Williamson. Oprah & Friends began broadcasting at 11:00 am ET, September 25, 2006, from a new studio at Winfrey's Chicago headquarters. The channel broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week on XM Radio Channel 156. Winfrey's contract requires her to be on the air 30 minutes a week, 39 weeks a year.

Personal life

Homes

Winfrey currently lives on "The Promised Land," her 42-acre (17-ha) estate with ocean and mountain views in Montecito, California. Winfrey also owns a house in Lavallette, New Jersey; an apartment in Chicago; an estate on Fisher Island, Florida; a ski house in Telluride, Colorado; and properties on Maui, Hawaii; Antigua; and Orcas Island, Washington State.

Romantic history
Winfrey's high school sweetheart Anthony Otey recalled an innocent courtship that began in Winfrey's senior year of high school, from which he saved hundreds of love notes; Winfrey conducted herself with dignity and was a model student. The two spoke of getting married, but Otey claimed to have always secretly known that Winfrey was destined for a far greater life than he could ever provide. She broke up with him on Valentine's Day of her senior year.Mair (1999), p. 31.

In 1971, several months after breaking up with Otey, Winfrey met William "Bubba" Taylor at Tennessee State University. According to CBS journalist George Mair, Taylor was Winfrey's "first intense, to die for love affair". Winfrey helped get Taylor a job at WVOL, and according to Mair, "did everything to keep him, including literally begging him on her knees to stay with her". Taylor, however, was unwilling to leave Nashville with Winfrey when she moved to Baltimore to work at WJZ-TV in June 1976. "We really did care for each other," Winfrey would later recall. "We shared a deep love. A love I will never forget."

In the 1970s, Winfrey had a romantic relationship with John Tesh. Biographer Kitty Kelley claims that Tesh split with Winfrey over the pressures of an interracial relationship.

When WJZ-TV management criticized Winfrey for crying on air while reporting tragedies and were unhappy with her physical appearance (especially when her hair fell out as a result of a bad perm), Winfrey turned to reporter Lloyd Kramer for comfort. "Lloyd was just the best," Winfrey would later recall. "That man loved me even when I was bald! He was wonderful. He stuck with me through the whole demoralizing experience. That man was the most fun romance I ever had."

According to Mair, when Kramer moved to NBC in New York, Winfrey had a love affair with a married man who had no intention of leaving his wife. Winfrey would later recall: "I'd had a relationship with a man for four years. I wasn't living with him. I'd never lived with anyone—and I thought I was worthless without him. The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted, powerless. At the end, I was down on the floor on my knees groveling and pleading with him". Winfrey became so depressed that on September 8, 1981, she wrote a suicide note to best friend Gayle King instructing King to water her plants. "That suicide note had been much overplayed" Winfrey told Ms. magazine. "I couldn't kill myself. I would be afraid the minute I did it, something really good would happen and I'd miss it."

According to Winfrey, her emotional turmoil gradually led to a weight problem: "The reason I gained so much weight in the first place and the reason I had such a sorry history of abusive relationships with men was I just needed approval so much. I needed everyone to like me, because I didn't like myself much. So I'd end up with these cruel self-absorbed guys who'd tell me how selfish I was, and I'd say 'Oh thank you, you're so right' and be grateful to them. Because I had no sense that I deserved anything else. Which is also why I gained so much weight later on. It was the perfect way of cushioning myself against the world's disapproval."

Winfrey later confessed to smoking crack cocaine with a man she was romantically involved with during the same era. She explained on her show: "I always felt that the drug itself is not the problem but that I was addicted to the man." She added: "I can't think of anything I wouldn't have done for that man."

Winfrey was allegedly involved in a second drug-related love affair. Self-proclaimed former boyfriend Randolph Cook said they lived together for several months in 1985 and did drugs. In 1997, Cook tried to sue Winfrey for $20 million for allegedly blocking a tell-all book about their alleged relationship.

In the mid-1980s, Winfrey briefly dated movie critic Roger Ebert, whom she credits with advising her to take her show into syndication.

In 1985, before Winfrey's Chicago talk show had gone national, Haitian filmmaker Reginald Chevalier claims he appeared as a guest on a look-alike segment and began a relationship with Winfrey involving romantic evenings at home, candlelit baths, and dinners with Michael Jordan and Danny Glover. Chevalier says Winfrey ended the relationship when she met Stedman Graham.

Winfrey and her boyfriend Stedman Graham have been together since 1986. They were engaged to be married in November 1992, but the ceremony never took place.

Close friends

Winfrey's best friend since their early twenties is Gayle King. King was formerly the host of The Gayle King Show and is currently an editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Since 1997, when Winfrey played the therapist on an episode of the sitcom Ellen in which Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet, Winfrey and King have been the target of persistent rumors that they were gay. "I understand why people think we're gay," Winfrey says in the August 2006 issue of O magazine. "There isn't a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it—how can you be this close without it being sexual?" "I've told nearly everything there is to tell. All my stuff is out there. People think I'd be so ashamed of being gay that I wouldn't admit it? Oh, please."

Winfrey has also had a long friendship with Maria Shriver, after they met in Baltimore. Winfrey considered Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her mentor and close friend; she called Angelou her "mother-sister-friend". Winfrey hosted a week-long Caribbean cruise for Angelou and 150 guests for Angelou's 70th birthday in 1998, and in 2008, threw her "an extravagant 80th birthday celebration" at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Personal wealth
Born in rural poverty, and raised by a mother dependent on government welfare payments in a poor urban neighborhood, Winfrey became a millionaire at the age of 32 when her talk show received national syndication. Winfrey negotiated ownership rights to the television program and started her own production company. At the age of 41, Winfrey had a net worth of $340 million and replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. By 2000, with a net worth of $800 million, Winfrey is believed to have been the richest African American of the 20th century. There has been a course taught at the University of Illinois focusing on Winfrey's business acumen, namely: "History 298: Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon". Winfrey was the highest paid television entertainer in the United States in 2006, earning an estimated $260 million during the year, five times the sum earned by second-place music executive Simon Cowell. By 2008, her yearly income had increased to $275 million.Forbes list of The World's Billionaires has listed Winfrey as the world's only black billionaire from 2004 to 2006 and as the first black woman billionaire in the world that was achieved in 2003.  As of 2014, Winfrey had a net worth in excess of 2.9 billion dollars and had overtaken former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as the richest self-made woman in America.

Religious views
Oprah was raised a Baptist. In her early life, she would speak at local, mostly African American congregations of the Southern Baptist Convention that were often deeply religious and familiar with such themes as evangelical Protestantism, the Black church, and being born-again.Oprah Winfrey: Global Media Leader by Katherine E. Krohn, pg. 14

She was quoted as saying: "I have church with myself: I have church walking down the street. I believe in the God force that lives inside all of us, and once you tap into that, you can do anything." She also stated, "Doubt means don't. When you don't know what to do, do nothing until you do know what to do. Because the doubt is your inner voice or the voice of God or whatever you choose to call it. It is your instinct trying to tell you something is off. That's how I have found myself to be led spiritually, because that's your spiritual voice saying to you, 'let's think about it.' So when you don't know what to do, do nothing."

Oprah has stated that she is a Christian and her favorite Bible verse is Acts 17:28.

Oprah attends The Potter's House Church, Dallas service, an Evangelical church.

Influence
Rankings

Winfrey was called "arguably the world's most powerful woman" by CNN and TIME, "arguably the most influential woman in the world" by The American Spectator, "one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th Century" and "one of the most influential people" from 2004 to 2011 by TIME. Winfrey is the only person to have appeared in the latter list on ten occasions.

At the end of the 20th century, Life listed Winfrey as both the most influential woman and the most influential black person of her generation, and in a cover story profile the magazine called her "America's most powerful woman". In 2007, USA Today ranked Winfrey as the most influential woman and most influential black person of the previous quarter-century. Ladies' Home Journal also ranked Winfrey number one in their list of the most powerful women in America and then Senator Barack Obama in 2007 said she "may be the most influential woman in the country". In 1998, Winfrey became the first woman and first African American to top Entertainment Weekly's list of the 101 most powerful people in the entertainment industry. Forbes named her the world's most powerful celebrity in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2013.

As chairman of Harpo Inc., she was named the most powerful woman in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter in 2008. She has been listed as one of the most powerful 100 women in the world by Forbes, ranking 14th in 2014. In 2010, Life magazine named Winfrey one of the 100 people who changed the world, alongside Jesus Christ, Elvis Presley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Winfrey was the only living woman to make the list.

Columnist Maureen Dowd seems to agree with such assessments. Interviewed by The Guardian in 2006, Dowd said: "She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president. Other successful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, had to be publicly slapped down before they could move forward. Even Condi has had to play the protégé with Bush. None of this happened to Oprah – she is a straight ahead success story." Vanity Fair wrote: "Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope. Bill O'Reilly said: "this is a woman that came from nothing to rise up to be the most powerful woman, I think, in the world. I think Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the world, not just in America. That's – anybody who goes on her program immediately benefits through the roof. I mean, she has a loyal following; she has credibility; she has talent; and she's done it on her own to become fabulously wealthy and fabulously powerful."

In 2005, Winfrey was named the greatest woman in American history as part of a public poll as part of The Greatest American. She was ranked No. 9 overall on the list of greatest Americans. However, polls estimating Winfrey's personal popularity have been inconsistent. A November 2003 Gallup poll estimated that 73% of American adults had a favorable view of Winfrey. Another Gallup poll in January 2007 estimated the figure at 74%, although it dropped to 66% when Gallup conducted the same poll in October 2007. A December 2007 Fox News poll put the figure at 55%. According to Gallup's annual most admired poll, Americans consistently rank Winfrey as one of the most admired women in the world. Her highest rating came in 2007 when she was statistically tied with Hillary Clinton for first place. In a list compiled by the British magazine New Statesman in September 2010, she was voted 38th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".

In 1989, she was accepted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame.

"Oprahfication"The Wall Street Journal coined the term "Oprahfication," meaning public confession as a form of therapy. By confessing intimate details about her weight problems, tumultuous love life, and sexual abuse, and crying alongside her guests, Winfrey has been credited by Time magazine with creating a new form of media communication known as "rapport talk" as distinguished from the "report talk" of Phil Donahue: "Winfrey saw television's power to blend public and private; while it links strangers and conveys information over public airwaves, TV is most often viewed in the privacy of our homes. Like a family member, it sits down to meals with us and talks to us in the lonely afternoons. Grasping this paradox, ... She makes people care because she cares. That is Winfrey's genius, and will be her legacy, as the changes she has wrought in the talk show continue to permeate our culture and shape our lives."

Observers have also noted the "Oprahfication" of politics such as "Oprah-style debates" and Bill Clinton being described as "the man who brought Oprah-style psychobabble and misty confessions to politics". Newsweek stated: "Every time a politician lets his lip quiver or a cable anchor 'emotes' on TV, they nod to the cult of confession that Oprah helped create.

The November 1988 Ms. observed that "in a society where fat is taboo, she made it in a medium that worships thin and celebrates a bland, white-bread prettiness of body and personality [...] But Winfrey made fat sexy, elegant – damned near gorgeous – with her drop-dead wardrobe, easy body language, and cheerful sensuality."

Daytime talk show's impact on LGBT people
While Phil Donahue has been credited with pioneering the tabloid talk show genre, Winfrey's warmth, intimacy, and personal confession popularized and changed it. Her success at popularizing the tabloid talk show genre opened up a thriving industry that has included Ricki Lake, The Jenny Jones Show, and The Jerry Springer Show.  In the book Freaks Talk Back, Yale sociology professor Joshua Gamson credits the tabloid talk show genre with providing much needed high impact media visibility for gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and doing more to make them mainstream and socially acceptable than any other development of the 20th century. In the book's editorial review, Michael Bronski wrote, "In the recent past, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people had almost no presence on television. With the invention and propagation of tabloid talk shows such as Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Oprah, and Geraldo, people outside the sexual mainstream now appear in living rooms across America almost every day of the week." Gamson credits the tabloid talk show with making alternative sexual orientations and identities more acceptable in mainstream society. Examples include a Time magazine article on early 21st-century gays coming out of the closet at an increasingly younger age and on plummeting gay suicide rates. Gamson also believes that tabloid talk shows caused gays to be accepted on more traditional forms of media.

In April 1997, Winfrey played the therapist in "The Puppy Episode" on the sitcom Ellen to whom the character (and the real-life Ellen DeGeneres) said she was a lesbian.

"The Oprah Effect"
The power of Winfrey's opinions and endorsement to influence public opinion, especially consumer purchasing choices, has been dubbed "the Oprah Effect". The effect has been documented or alleged in domains as diverse as book sales, beef markets, and election voting. Late in 1996, Winfrey introduced the Oprah's Book Club segment to her television show. The segment focused on new books and classics and often brought obscure novels to popular attention. The book club became such a powerful force that whenever Winfrey introduced a new book as her book-club selection, it instantly became a best-seller; for example, when she selected the classic John Steinbeck novel East of Eden, it soared to the top of the book charts. Being recognized by Winfrey often means a million additional book sales for an author. In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America (2005), Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading – a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act – and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books."

When author Jonathan Franzen's book was selected for the Book Club, he reportedly "cringed" and said selected books tend to be "schmaltzy". After James Frey's A Million Little Pieces was found to contain fabrications in 2006, Winfrey confronted him on her show over the breach of trust. In 2009, Winfrey apologized to Frey for the public confrontation. During a show about mad cow disease with Howard Lyman (aired on April 16, 1996), Winfrey said she was stopped cold from eating another burger. Texas cattlemen sued her and Lyman in early 1998 for "false defamation of perishable food" and "business disparagement," claiming that Winfrey's remarks sent cattle prices tumbling, costing beef producers $11 million. Winfrey was represented by attorney Chip Babcock and, on February 26, after a two-month trial in an Amarillo, Texas, court, a jury found Winfrey and Lyman were not liable for damages. During the lawsuit, Winfrey hired Phil McGraw's company Courtroom Sciences, Inc. to help her analyze and read the jury. Winfrey's ability to launch other successful talk shows such as Dr. Phil, The Dr. Oz Show, and Rachael Ray has also been cited as examples of "The Oprah Effect".

Politics
Matthew Baum and Angela Jamison performed an experiment testing their hypothesis, "Politically unaware individuals who consume soft news will be more likely to vote consistently than their counterparts who do not consume soft news". In their studies, they found that low-awareness individuals who watch soft news shows, such as The Oprah Winfrey Show are 14% more likely to vote consistently than low-awareness individuals who only watch hard news.

Winfrey states she is a political independent who has "earned the right to think for myself and to vote for myself". She endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. On September 25, 2006, Winfrey made her first endorsement of Obama for president on Larry King Live, the first time she endorsed a political candidate running for office. Two economists estimate that Winfrey's endorsement was worth over a million votes in the Democratic primary race and that without it, Obama would have lost the nomination. Winfrey held a fundraiser for Obama on September 8, 2007, at her Santa Barbara estate. In December 2007, Winfrey joined Obama for a series of rallies in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The Columbia, South Carolina, event on December 9, 2007, drew a crowd of nearly 30,000, the largest for any political event of 2007. An analysis by two economists at the University of Maryland, College Park estimated that Winfrey's endorsement was responsible for between 420,000 and 1,600,000 votes for Obama in the Democratic primary alone, based on a sample of states that did not include Texas, Michigan, North Dakota, Kansas, or Alaska. The results suggest that in the sampled states, Winfrey's endorsement was responsible for the difference in the popular vote between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, reported being so impressed by Winfrey's endorsement that he considered offering Winfrey Obama's vacant senate seat, describing Winfrey as "the most instrumental person in electing Barack Obama president," with "a voice larger than all 100 senators combined". Winfrey responded by stating that although she was absolutely not interested, she did feel she could be a senator. The Topps trading card company memorialized Oprah's involvement in the campaign by featuring her on a card in a set commemorating Obama's road to the White House.

In April 2014, Winfrey spoke for more than 20 minutes at a fundraiser in Arlington, Virginia, for Lavern Chatman, a candidate in a primary to nominate a Democratic Party candidate for election to the  U.S. House of Representatives.  Winfrey participated in the event even after reports had revealed that Chatman had been found liable in 2001 for her role in a scheme to defraud hundreds of District of Columbia nursing-home employees of at least $1.4 million in owed wages.

In April 2014, Winfrey spoke for more than 20 minutes at a fundraiser in Arlington, Virginia, for Lavern Chatman, a candidate in a primary to nominate a Democratic Party candidate for election to the  U.S. House of Representatives.  Winfrey participated in the event even after reports had revealed that Chatman had been found liable in 2001 for her role in a scheme to defraud hundreds of District of Columbia nursing-home employees of at least $1.4 million in owed wages.

Winfrey endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and referred to Republican candidate Donald Trump as a "demagogue". In 2018, Winfrey canvassed door-to-door for Georgia gubernatorial Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams and donated $500,000 to the March for Our Lives student demonstration in favor of gun control in the United States.

Winfrey has at times been the subject of media speculation that she may run for president herself, most notably in the lead-up to the 2020 election in which some reports claimed that she was actively considering launching a campaign for the Democratic nomination. Winfrey ultimately denied any plans to run for president, saying in 2018 that while it was "a humbling thing to have people think you can run the country", she "would not be able to do it. It's not a clean business. It would kill me." Winfrey suggested that she would publicly endorse a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries, however she ultimately did not do so. She later campaigned for Joe Biden during the general election.

In early 2018, Winfrey met with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, when he visited the United States.

Spiritual leadership
In 2000, she was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. In 2002, Christianity Today published an article called "The Church of O" in which they concluded that Winfrey had emerged as an influential spiritual leader. "Since 1994, when she abandoned traditional talk-show fare for more edifying content, and 1998, when she began 'Change Your Life TV', Oprah's most significant role has become that of a spiritual leader. To her audience of more than 22 million mostly female viewers, she has become a postmodern priestess—an icon of church-free spirituality." The sentiment was echoed by Marcia Z. Nelson in her book The Gospel According to Oprah. Since the mid-1990s, Winfrey's show has emphasized uplifting and inspirational topics and themes and some viewers say the show has motivated them to perform acts of altruism such as helping Congolese women and building an orphanage. A scientific study by psychological scientists at the University of Cambridge, University of Plymouth, and University of California used an uplifting clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show in an experiment that discovered that watching the 'uplifting' clip caused subjects to become twice as helpful as subjects assigned to watch a British comedy or nature documentary.

In 1998, Winfrey began an ongoing conversation with Gary Zukav, an American spiritual teacher, who appeared on her television show 35 times. Winfrey has said she keeps a copy of Zukav's The Seat of the Soul at her bedside, a book that she says is one of her all-time favorites.

On the season premiere of Winfrey's 13th season, Roseanne Barr told Winfrey "you're the African Mother Goddess of us all" inspiring much enthusiasm from the studio audience. The animated series Futurama alluded to her spiritual influence by suggesting that "Oprahism" is a mainstream religion in 3000 AD. Twelve days after the September 11 attacks, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani asked Winfrey to serve as host of a Prayer for America service at New York City's Yankee Stadium, which was attended by former president Bill Clinton and New York senator Hillary Clinton. Leading up to the U.S.-led 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, less than a month after the September 11 attacks, Winfrey aired a controversial show called "Islam 101" in which she portrayed Islam as a religion of peace, calling it "the most misunderstood of the three major religions". In 2002, George W. Bush invited Winfrey to join a US delegation that included adviser Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, planning to go to Afghanistan to celebrate the return of Afghan girls to school. The "Oprah strategy" was designed to portray the War on Terror in a positive light; however, when Winfrey refused to participate, the trip was postponed.

Leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Winfrey's show received criticism for allegedly having an anti-war bias. Ben Shapiro of Townhall.com wrote: "Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in America. She decides what makes The New York Times Best Seller lists. Her touchy-feely style sucks in audiences at the rate of 14 million viewers per day. But Oprah is far more than a cultural force, she's a dangerous political force as well, a woman with unpredictable and mercurial attitudes toward the major issues of the day." In 2006, Winfrey recalled such controversies: "I once did a show titled Is War the Only Answer? In the history of my career, I've never received more hate mail – like 'Go back to Africa' hate mail. I was accused of being un-American for even raising the question." Filmmaker Michael Moore came to Winfrey's defense, praising her for showing antiwar footage no other media would show and begging her to run for president.

A February 2003 series, in which Winfrey showed clips from people all over the world asking America not to go to war, was interrupted in several East Coast markets by network broadcasts of a press conference in which President George W. Bush and Colin Powell summarized the case for war.

In 2007, Winfrey began to endorse the self-help program The Secret. The Secret claims that people can change their lives through positive thoughts or 'vibrations', which will then cause them to attract more positive vibrations that result in good things happening to them. Peter Birkenhead of Salon magazine argued that this idea is pseudoscience and psychologically damaging, as it trivializes important decisions and promotes a quick-fix material culture, and suggests Winfrey's promotion of it is irresponsible given her influence. In 2007, skeptic and magician James Randi accused Winfrey of being deliberately deceptive and uncritical in how she handles paranormal claims on her show. In 2008, Winfrey endorsed author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, which sold several million extra copies after being selected for her book club. During a Webinar class, in which she promoted the book, Winfrey stated "God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience [...] then that's not truly God." Frank Pastore, a Christian radio talk show host on KKLA, was among the many Christian leaders who criticized Winfrey's views, saying "if she's a Christian, she's an ignorant one because Christianity is incompatible with New Age thought".

Winfrey was named as the 2008 Person of the Year by animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for using her fame and listening audience to help the less fortunate, including animals. PETA praised Winfrey for using her talk show to uncover horrific cases of cruelty to animals in puppy mills and on factory farms, and Winfrey even used the show to highlight the cruelty-free vegan diet that she tried.

In 2009, Winfrey filmed a series of interviews in Denmark highlighting its citizens as the happiest people in the world. In 2010, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News criticized these shows for promoting a left-wing society. Following the launch of the Super Soul Sunday and SuperSoul Sessions programs on Harpo Productions' SuperSoul TV, in 2016 Winfrey selected 100 people for the SuperSoul 100 list of "innovators and visionaries who are aligned on a mission to move humanity forward".

On using the N-word, Winfrey said, "You cannot be my friend and use that word around me. ... I always think of the...people who heard that as their last word as they were hanging from a tree."

Fan base
The viewership for The Oprah Winfrey Show was highest during the 1991–92 season, when about 13.1 million U.S. viewers were watching each day. By 2003, ratings declined to 7.4 million daily viewers. Ratings briefly rebounded to approximately 9 million in 2005 and then declined again to around 7.3 million viewers in 2008, though it remained the highest rated talk show.

In 2008, Winfrey's show was airing in 140 countries internationally and seen by an estimated 46 million people in the US weekly. According to the Harris poll, Winfrey was America's favorite television personality in 1998, 2000, 2002–06, and 2009. Winfrey was especially popular among women, Democrats, political moderates, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Southern Americans, and East Coast Americans.

Outside the U.S., Winfrey has become increasingly popular in the Arab world. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that MBC 4, an Arab satellite channel, centered its entire programming around reruns of her show because it was drawing record numbers of female viewers in Saudi Arabia. In 2008, The New York Times reported that The Oprah Winfrey Show, with Arabic subtitles, was broadcast twice each weekday on MBC 4. Winfrey's modest dress, combined with her attitude of triumph over adversity and abuse has caused some women in Saudi Arabia to idealize her.

Philanthropy

In 2004, Winfrey became the first black person to rank among the 50 most generous Americans and she remained among the top 50 until 2010. By 2012, she had given away about $400 million to educational causes.

As of 2012, Winfrey had also given over 400 scholarships to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Winfrey was the recipient of the first Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the 2002 Emmy Awards for services to television and film. To celebrate two decades on national TV, and to thank her employees for their hard work, Winfrey took her staff and their families (1,065 people in total) on vacation to Hawaii in the summer of 2006.

In 2013, Winfrey donated $12 million to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom later that same year.

Oprah's Angel Network
In 1998, Winfrey created the Oprah's Angel Network, a charity that supported charitable projects and provided grants to nonprofit organizations around the world. Oprah's Angel Network raised more than $80 million ($1 million of which was donated by Jon Bon Jovi). Winfrey personally covered all administrative costs associated with the charity, so 100% of all funds raised went to charity programs. In May 2010, with Oprah's show ending, the charity stopped accepting donations and was shut down.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Oprah created the Oprah Angel Network Katrina registry which raised more than $11 million for relief efforts. Winfrey personally gave $10 million to the cause. Homes were built in Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama before the one-year anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

South Africa

In 2004, Winfrey and her team filmed an episode of her show, Oprah's Christmas Kindness, in which Winfrey travelled to South Africa to bring attention to the plight of young children affected by poverty and AIDS. During the 21-day trip, Winfrey and her crew visited schools and orphanages in poverty-stricken areas, and distributed Christmas presents to 50,000 children, with dolls for the girls and soccer balls for the boys, and school supplies. Throughout the show, Winfrey appealed to viewers to donate money to Oprah's Angel Network for poor and AIDS-affected children in Africa. From that show alone, viewers around the world donated over $7 million. Winfrey invested $40 million and some of her time establishing the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley on Klip south of Johannesburg, South Africa. The school set over 22 acres, opened in January 2007 with an enrollment of 150 pupils (increasing to 450) and features state-of-the-art classrooms, computer and science laboratories, a library, theatre, and beauty salon. Nelson Mandela praised Winfrey for overcoming her own disadvantaged youth to become a benefactor for others. Critics considered the school elitist and unnecessarily luxurious. Winfrey rejected the claims, saying: "If you are surrounded by beautiful things and wonderful teachers who inspire you, that beauty brings out the beauty in you." Winfrey, who has no surviving biological children, described maternal feelings towards the girls at Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. Winfrey teaches a class at the school via satellite.

Filmography

As actress

As herself

As producer only
 1989 – The Oprah Winfrey Show (supervising producer – 8 episodes, 1989–2011)
 1989 – The Women of Brewster Place (TV miniseries) (executive producer)
 1992 – Nine (TV documentary) (executive producer)
 1992 – Overexposed (TV movie) (executive producer)
 1993 – ABC Afterschool Special (TV series) (producer – 1 episode "Shades of a Single Protein") (producer)
 1993 – Michael Jackson Talks to... Oprah Live (TV special) (executive producer)
 1997 – Before Women Had Wings (TV movie) (producer)
 1998 – The Wedding (TV miniseries) (executive producer)
 1998 – Beloved (producer)
 1998 – David and Lisa (TV movie) (executive producer)
 1999 – Tuesdays with Morrie (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2001 – Amy & Isabelle (TV movie) (executive producer, producer)
 2002 – Oprah After the Show (TV series) (executive producer)
 2005 – Their Eyes Were Watching God (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2006 – Legends Ball (TV documentary) (executive producer)
 2007 – Oprah's Big Give (TV series) (executive producer)
 2007 – The Oprah Winfrey Oscar Special (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2007 – Building a Dream: The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy (TV documentary) (executive producer)
 2007 – Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's For One More Day (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2007 – The Great Debaters (producer)
 2009 – The Dr. Oz Show (TV series) (executive producer)
 2009 – Precious (executive producer)
 2009 – Christmas at the White House: An Oprah Primetime Special (TV special) (executive producer)
 2010 – The Oprah Winfrey Oscar Special (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2011 – Your OWN Show (TV series) (executive producer)
 2011 – Extraordinary Mom (TV documentary) (executive producer)
 2011 – Serving Life (TV documentary) (executive producer)
 2014 – The Hundred-Foot Journey (producer)
 2014 – Selma (producer)
 2016–present – Queen Sugar (co-creator and executive producer)
 2016–2020 – Greenleaf (executive producer)
 2017 – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (TV movie) (executive producer)
 2018 – Love Is (executive producer)
 2019 – When They See Us (executive producer)
 2019 – Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland (executive producer)
 2019 – David Makes Man (executive producer)
 2020 – The Water Man (executive producer)

Bibliography
By Oprah Winfrey
Winfrey, Oprah (1996). The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey: A Portrait in Her Own WordsWinfrey, Oprah (1998). Journey to Beloved (Photography by Ken Regan)
Winfrey, Oprah (1998). Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body and a Better Life (co-authored with Bob Greene)
Winfrey, Oprah (2000). Oprah Winfrey: The Soul and Spirit of a SuperstarWinfrey, Oprah (2014). What I Know for SureWinfrey, Oprah (2016). Mr. or Ms. Just Right (co-authored with B. Grace)
Winfrey, Oprah (2017). Food, Health and HappinessWinfrey, Oprah (2017). The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul ConversationsWinfrey, Oprah (2017). The Wisdom Journal: The Companion to The Wisdom of SundaysWinfrey, Oprah (2019). The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and PurposeWinfrey, Oprah (2021). What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (co-authored with B. Perry)

About Oprah Winfrey
 Mair, George (2001). Oprah Winfrey: The Real Story. Citadel Press. .
 Cooper, Irene (2007). Oprah Winfrey. Viking. .

See also
 List of awards and nominations received by Oprah Winfrey
African Americans in Mississippi

References

External links

 
 
 NPR "Oprah: The Billionaire Everywoman". Audio file, video and biography. Retrieved September 17, 2010
 
 Oprah Winfrey  Video produced by Makers: Women Who Make America 
 [https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/watchingoprah  Watching Oprah – Smithsonian exhibition on the Oprah Show'' and Winfrey

 
1954 births
Living people
20th-century African-American people
20th-century African-American women
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American businesswomen
20th-century American journalists
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
21st-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American businesswomen
21st-century American journalists
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American women writers
Actresses from Chicago
Actresses from Mississippi
African-American actresses
African-American billionaires
African-American business executives
African-American film producers
African-American screenwriters
African-American television directors
African-American television personalities
African-American television producers
African-American television talk show hosts
African-American women in business
African-American women writers
American billionaires
American business executives
American chief executives in the media industry
American film producers
American magazine publishers (people)
American mass media owners
American motivational speakers
Women motivational speakers
American motivational writers
American people of Kpelle descent
American people of Native American descent
American philanthropists
American radio producers
American self-help writers
American television actresses
American television directors
American television talk show hosts
American television writers
American voice actresses
American web producers
American women chief executives
American women film producers
American women journalists
American women non-fiction writers
American women philanthropists
American women screenwriters
American women television directors
American women television presenters
American women television producers
American women television writers
Businesspeople from Chicago
Businesspeople from Mississippi
Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host winners
Female billionaires
Founders of academic institutions
Illinois Independents
International Emmy Founders Award winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Journalists from Mississippi
Kennedy Center honorees
Miss Black America delegates
Peabody Award winners
People from Kosciusko, Mississippi
Philanthropists from Illinois
Philanthropists from Mississippi
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Spingarn Medal winners
Television anchors from Baltimore
Television anchors from Chicago
Television producers from Illinois
Tennessee State University alumni
Women motivational writers
Writers from Chicago
Writers from Mississippi
There are numerous variations of the color purple, a sampling of which are shown below.

In common English usage, purple is a range of hues of color occurring between red and blue. 
However, the meaning of the term purple is not well defined. There is confusion about the meaning of the terms purple and violet even among native speakers of English. Many native speakers of English in the United States refer to the blue-dominated spectral color beyond blue as purple, but the same color is referred to as violet by many native English speakers in the United Kingdom. The full range of colors between red and blue is referred to by the term purple in some British authoritative texts, whereas the same range of colors is referred to by the term violet in some other texts. 
The confusion about the range of meanings of the terms violet and purple is even larger when including other languages and historical texts. 
Since this wikipedia page contains contributions from authors from different countries and different native languages, this wikipedia page is likely to be not consistent in the use of the color terms purple and violet.

In formal color theory, purple colors often refer to the colors on the line of purples on the CIE chromaticity diagram (or colors that can be derived from colors on the line of purples), i.e., any color between red and violet, not including either red or violet themselves.

The first recorded use of purple as a color name in English was in 975 AD.

Historical development of purple

Tyrian purple: Classical antiquity

See also under Purple#In_art, history and fashion the section "In prehistory and the ancient world: Tyrian purple" 

"Tyrian purple" is the contemporary English name of the color that in Latin is denominated "purpura". Other contemporary English names for purpura are "imperial purple" and "royal purple". The English name "purple" itself originally denominated the specific color purpura. Purpura is the color of a dye extracted from a mollusk found on the shores of the city of Tyre in ancient Phoenicia (contemporarily in Lebanon), which color in classical antiquity was a symbol of royalty and political authority because only the very wealthy could afford it, including the Roman Emperors. Therefore, Tyrian purple was also denominated "imperial purple".

Tyrian purple may have been discovered as early as during the Minoan civilization. Alexander the Great, when giving imperial audiences as the Emperor of Macedonia; the Emperor of the Seleucid Empire; and the Kings of Ptolemaic Egypt all wore Tyrian purple. The imperial robes of Roman emperors were of Tyrian purple trimmed in metallic gold thread. The badge of office of a Roman Senator was a stripe of Tyrian purple on his white toga. Tyrian purple was continued in use by the Emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire until its final collapse in 1453.

The tone of Tyrian purple displayed above is that tone of Tyrian purple which was the color of "clotted blood", which was considered the tone having the most prestige in ancient Greece and Rome, as recorded by Pliny the Elder. However, the actual tone varied depending on how the dye was formulated. Lesser royal houses that wanted to economize could mix Tyrian purple dye with the much less expensive indigo to create a color closer to violet.

Han purple: Ancient China

Han purple is a type of artificial pigment found in China between 500 BC and AD 220. It was used in the decoration of the Terracotta Army.

Royal purple: 17th century

The color royal purple is shown at right.
This tone of purple is bluer than the ancient Tyrian purple.

The first recorded use of royal purple as a color name in English was in 1661.

In 1990, royal purple was formulated as one of the Crayola crayon colors.

Mauveine: 1860s–1890s

Mauveine was first named in 1856. Chemist Sir William Henry Perkin, then eighteen, was attempting to create artificial quinine. An unexpected residue caught his eye, which turned out to be the first aniline dye—specifically, Perkin's mauve or mauveine is sometimes called aniline purple. Perkin was so successful in recommending his discovery to the dyestuffs industry that his biography by Simon Garfield is titled Mauve. As mauveine faded easily, our contemporary understanding of mauve is as a lighter, less saturated color than it was originally known.

"Mauveine" was named after the mauve colored mallow flower, even though it is a much deeper tone of purple than mauve.  The term "Mauve" in the late 19th century could refer to either the deep, rich color of the dye or the light color of the flower.  Mauve (meaning Mauveine) came into great vogue when in 1862 Queen Victoria appeared at the Royal Exhibition in a mauve silk gown—dyed with mauveine. By 1890, this color had become so pervasive in fashion that author Thomas Beer used it in the title of his book about the 1890s, The Mauve Decade.

Artists' pigment purple (red-violet): 1930s

In some parts of the world, 'Royal purple' (shown above) or the dark violet color known as generic purple is the common layman's idea of purple, but these color terms carry different meanings in different parts of the world. Even among modern native speakers of English there is confusion about the terms purple and violet. In the United Kingdom, many native speakers of English refer to the blue-dominated spectral color beyond blue as violet, but this color is called purple by many speakers in the United States. 
In some texts the term violet refers to any color between red and blue. However, there are also authoritative texts from the United Kingdom in which this same range of colors is referred to by the term purple. 
When including languages other than English, and epochs other than the modern period, the uncertainty about the meanings of the color terms violet and purple is even larger. Since this wikipedia page contains contributions from authors from different countries and different native languages, it is likely to be not consistent in the use of the color terms violet and purple.

Artists that  happen to follow Munsell color system (introduced in 1905 and used since 1930 by a large number of artists in the United States, but by much fewer artists outside the US), may regard purple as being synonymous with the red-violet color shown at right, represented by the web color medium violet red. Munsell included purple as a color hue in his color system, but he did not do so for violet as he did not need it as a label for his system (just like the hue term orange is not used in Munsell's system). If defined as blue-dominated colors between blue and red, violet colors in Munsell's system would be classified as having the 7.5PB and 10.0PB hue, which is confirmed in visual experiments
 
The truly purple color, defined as being within the range of the red-dominated colors between red and blue, is sometimes confusingly labeled as red-violet color, or more correctly artist's purple. It is the pigment color that would be on a pigment color color wheel between pigment violet and pigment (process) magenta. In the Munsell color system, this color at its maximum chroma of 12 is called Red-Purple, or more specifically Munsell 5RP.

Artists' pigments and colored pencils labeled as purple are typically colored the red-violet color shown at right.  On an RYB color wheel, the so-called red-violet color is the color between red and violet.

Electric purple: 2000s

This color, electric purple, is precisely halfway between violet and magenta and thus fits the artistic definition of purple.

Using additive colors such as those on computer screens, it is possible to create a much brighter purple than with pigments where the mixing subtracts frequencies from the component primary colors. The equivalent color on a computer to the pigment color red-violet shown above would be this electric purple, i.e. the much brighter purple you can see reproduced on the screen of a computer. This color is pure purple conceived as computer artists conceive it, as the color on the color wheel halfway between color wheel violet and electric magenta. Thus, electric purple is the purest and brightest purple that it is possible to display on a computer screen. Its RGB code is (191, 0, 255).

An old name for this color, used by Robert Ridgway in his 1912 book on color nomenclature, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, is true purple.

Computer web color purples

Purple (HTML/CSS color) (patriarch)

This purple used in HTML and CSS actually is deeper and has a more reddish hue (#800080) than the X11 color purple shown below as purple (X11 color) (#A020F0), which is bluer and brighter.

This color may be called HTML/CSS purple. It seems likely that this color was chosen as the web color purple because its hue is exactly halfway between red and blue and its value is exactly halfway between white and black.

A traditional name sometimes used for this tone of purple is patriarch. The first recorded use of patriarch as a color name in English was in 1925.

Purple (X11 color) (veronica)

At right is displayed the color purple, as defined in the X11 color, which is a lot brighter and bluer than the HTML purple shown above.

See the chart Color names that clash between X11 and HTML/CSS in the X11 color names article to see those colors which are different in HTML and X11.

This color can be called X11 purple.

The traditional name for this tone of purple is veronica. The first recorded use of veronica as a color name in English was in 1919.

Medium purple (X11)

Displayed at right is the web color medium purple.

This color is a medium shade of the bright X11 purple shown above.

Rebecca purple

Rebecca purple was named after the daughter of CSS pioneer Eric A. Meyer and added to CSS 4.1.

Additional definition of purple

Purple (Munsell)

The color defined as purple in the Munsell color system (Munsell 5P) is shown at right. The Munsell color system is a color space that specifies colors based on three color dimensions: hue, value (lightness), and chroma (color purity), spaced uniformly in three dimensions in the elongated oval at an angle shaped Munsell color solid according to the logarithmic scale which governs human perception. In order for all the colors to be spaced uniformly, it was found necessary to use a color wheel with five primary colors—red, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

The Munsell colors displayed are only approximate as they have been adjusted to fit into the sRGB gamut.

Additional variations

Pale purple

Pale purple is the pale tint of purple.

Mauve

Mauve  (rhymes with "grove"; from the French form of Malva "mallow") is a pale purple. Mauve is named after the mallow flower. Another name for the color is mallow with the first recorded use of mallow as a color name in English in 1611.

Thistle

Thistle is a light purple resembling the thistle plant.

The first recorded use of Thistle as a color name in English was in 1892.

The color thistle is associated with Scotland because the thistle is the national flower of Scotland and Scotland's highest state decoration is the Order of the Thistle.

Orchid

The color orchid is a bright rich purple. The name 'orchid' originates from the flowers of some species of the vast orchid flower family, such as Laelia furfuracea and Ascocentrum pusillum, which have petals of this color.

The first recorded use of orchid as a color name in English was in 1915.

Heliotrope

The color heliotrope is a brilliant tone of purple; it is a pink-purple tint that is a representation of the color of the heliotrope flower.

The first recorded use of heliotrope as a color name in English was in 1882.

Psychedelic purple (phlox)

The pure essence of purple was approximated in pigment in the late 1960s by mixing fluorescent magenta and fluorescent blue pigments together to make fluorescent purple to use in psychedelic black light paintings. This tone of purple was very popular among hippies and was the favorite color of Jimi Hendrix. Thus it is called psychedelic purple. Psychedelic purple is the color halfway between electric purple and magenta.

In the 1980s, there was a Jimi Hendrix Museum in a Victorian house on the east side of Central Avenue one half block south of Haight Street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco which was painted this color.

Another name for this color is phlox, as it is the color of the phlox flower. The first recorded use of phlox as a color name in English was in 1918.

Purple pizzazz

Displayed at right is the color purple pizzazz.

This color was formulated by Crayola in 1990.

Liseran purple

Displayed at right is the color liseran purple.

The first recorded use of liseran purple as a color name in English was in 1912.

Mulberry

The color mulberry is displayed at right. This color is a representation of the color of mulberry jam or pie. This was a Crayola crayon color from 1958 to 2003.

The first recorded use of mulberry as a color name in English was in 1776.

Pearly purple

At right is displayed the color pearly purple.

Pearly purple is one of the colors in the special set of metallic colored Crayola crayons called Silver Swirls, the colors of which were formulated by Crayola in 1990.

Purpureus

The color purpureus is displayed at right.  Another name for this color is purpura.

The first recorded use of purpura as a color name in English was in 1382.

Northwestern Purple

Northwestern Purple is the official color of Northwestern University, as shown at the right.  Additionally, there are shades and tints that are variations of the base color. Northwestern Purple is a custom ink color and can no longer be referenced by a Pantone number.

KSU Purple

For printed material, purple (Pantone #268+) is the official school color of Kansas State University, as shown at the right. Traditionally, the school has referred to this darker and bluer shade as Royal Purple. [compare with Royal purple: 17th century] 
 
For the web, #512888 is the official color, even though that hex triplet is not a direct conversion from Pantone 268+.

Pomp and Power

The color pomp and power is displayed at right.

The color pomp and power is not found in the 1930 first edition of the Dictionary of Color by Maerz and Paul, but it is found in the second edition of 1950.

Mardi Gras

The color Mardi Gras is displayed at right.

The color name Mardi Gras has been in use since 2001 when the Xona.com Color List was first promulgated.

Eminence

The color eminence is displayed at right.

The color name eminence, used since the 1800s, has been in modern use for this color since 2001 when the Xona.com Color List was first promulgated.

Byzantium

The color Byzantium, a dark tone of purple, is displayed at right.

The first recorded use of byzantium as a color name in English was in 1926.

Pansy purple

The pansy flower has varieties that exhibit three different colors: pansy (a color between indigo and violet), pansy pink, and pansy purple.

The first recorded use of pansy purple as a color name in English was in 1814.

Palatinate

Palatinate is a color (a pale shade of violet) associated with the University of Durham (and with Newcastle University Medical School, this being the former medical school of Durham University.) A separate color, 'Palatinate Blue', is derived from the Coat of Arms of County Durham. The name 'Palatinate' in both instances alludes to the historic status of Durham as a County Palatine.

Dark purple

Dark purple is the dark tone of purple.

See also
 Crimson (color)
 Indigo
 Lists of colors
 Magenta
 Rose (color)
 Ultramarine
 Violet (color)
 Shades of violet

References

 Purple Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, purples are created with a combination of red and blue pigments. In the CMYK color model used in printing, purples are made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both.

Purple has long been associated with royalty, originally because Tyrian purple dye, made from crushed shells, was extremely expensive in antiquity. Purple was the color worn by Roman magistrates; it became the imperial color worn by the rulers of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and later by Roman Catholic bishops. Similarly in Japan, the color is traditionally associated with the emperor and aristocracy.

According to contemporary surveys in Europe and the United States, purple is the color most often associated with rarity, royalty, magic, mystery and piety. When combined with pink, it is associated with eroticism, femininity, and seduction.

Etymology and definitions 
The modern English word purple comes from the Old English purpul, which derives from Latin purpura, which, in turn, derives from the Greek  (porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail. The first recorded use of the word purple dates to the late 900s AD.

Relationship to violet 
Purple is closely associated with violet. In common usage, both refer to a variety of colors between blue and red in hue. Historically, purple has tended to be used for redder hues and violet for bluer hues. In optics, violet is a spectral color: It refers to the color of any different single wavelength of light on the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, between approximately 380 and 450 nanometers, whereas purple is the color of various combinations of red, blue, and violet light, some of which humans perceive as similar to violet.

In art, history, and fashion

In prehistory and the ancient world: Tyrian purple 

Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic era.  The artists of Pech Merle cave and other Neolithic sites in France used sticks of manganese and hematite powder to draw and paint animals and the outlines of their own hands on the walls of their caves. These works have been dated to between 16,000 and 25,000 BC.

As early as the 15th century BC the citizens of Sidon and Tyre, two cities on the coast of Ancient Phoenicia, (present day Lebanon), were producing purple dye from a sea snail called the spiny dye-murex.  Clothing colored with the Tyrian dye was mentioned in both the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid  of Virgil. The deep, rich purple dye made from this snail became known as Tyrian purple.

The process of making the dye was long, difficult and expensive. Thousands of the tiny snails had to be found, their shells cracked, the snail removed. Mountains of empty shells have been found at the ancient sites of Sidon and Tyre.  The snails were left to soak, then a tiny gland was removed and the juice extracted and put in a basin, which was placed in the sunlight. There, a remarkable transformation took place. In the sunlight the juice turned white, then yellow-green, then green, then violet, then a red which turned darker and darker. The process had to be stopped at exactly the right time to obtain the desired color, which could range from a bright crimson to a dark purple, the color of dried blood. Then either wool, linen or silk would be dyed.  The exact hue varied between crimson and violet, but it was always rich, bright and lasting.

Tyrian purple became the color of kings, nobles, priests and magistrates all around the Mediterranean. It was mentioned in the Old Testament; in the Book of Exodus, God instructs Moses to have the Israelites bring him an offering including cloth "of blue, and purple, and scarlet," to be used in the curtains of the Tabernacle and the garments of priests. The term used for purple in the 4th-century Latin Vulgate version of the Bible passage is purpura or Tyrian purple. In the Iliad of Homer, the belt of Ajax is purple, and the tails of the horses of Trojan warriors are dipped in purple. In the Odyssey, the blankets on the wedding bed of Odysseus are purple. In the poems of Sappho (6th century BC) she celebrates the skill of the dyers of the Greek kingdom of Lydia who made purple footwear, and in the play of Aeschylus (525–456 BC), Queen Clytemnestra welcomes back her husband Agamemnon by decorating the palace with purple carpets. In 950 BC, King Solomon was reported to have brought artisans from Tyre to provide purple fabrics to decorate the Temple of Jerusalem.

Alexander the Great (when giving imperial audiences as the basileus of the Macedonian Empire), the basileus of the Seleucid Empire, and the kings of Ptolemaic Egypt all wore Tyrian purple.

The Roman custom of wearing purple togas may have come from the Etruscans; an Etruscan tomb painting from the 4th century BC shows a nobleman wearing a deep purple and embroidered toga.

In Ancient Rome, the Toga praetexta was an ordinary white toga with a broad purple stripe on its border. It was worn by freeborn Roman boys who had not yet come of age, curule magistrates,
certain categories of priests,  and a few other categories of citizens.

The Toga picta was solid purple, embroidered with gold. During the Roman Republic, it was worn by generals in their triumphs, and by the Praetor Urbanus when he rode in the chariot of the gods into the circus at the Ludi Apollinares.  During the Empire, the toga picta was worn by magistrates giving public gladiatorial games, and by the consuls, as well as by the emperor on special occasions.

During the Roman Republic, when a triumph was held, the general being honored wore an entirely purple toga bordered in gold, and Roman Senators wore a toga with a purple stripe. However, during the Roman Empire, purple was more and more associated exclusively with the emperors and their officers. Suetonius claims that the early emperor Caligula had the King of Mauretania murdered for the splendour of his purple cloak, and that Nero forbade the use of certain purple dyes. In the late empire the sale of purple cloth became a state monopoly protected by the death penalty.

Jesus Christ, in the hours leading up to his crucifixion, was dressed in purple (πορφύρα: porphura) by the Roman garrison to mock his claim to be 'King of the Jews'.

The actual color of Tyrian purple seems to have varied from a reddish to a bluish purple. According to the Roman writer Vitruvius, (1st century BC), the murex shells coming from northern waters, probably Bolinus brandaris, produced a more bluish color than those of the south, probably Hexaplex trunculus. The most valued shades were said to be those closer to the color of dried blood, as seen in the mosaics of the robes of the Emperor Justinian in Ravenna. The chemical composition of the dye from the murex is close to that of the dye from indigo, and indigo was sometimes used to make a counterfeit Tyrian purple, a crime which was severely punished. What seems to have mattered about Tyrian purple was not its color, but its luster, richness, its resistance to weather and light, and its high price.

In modern times, Tyrian purple has been recreated, at great expense. When the German chemist Paul Friedander tried to recreate Tyrian purple in 2008, he needed twelve thousand mollusks to create 1.4 ounces of dye, enough to color a handkerchief. In the year 2000, a gram of Tyrian purple made from ten thousand mollusks according to the original formula cost two thousand euros.

China 

In ancient China, purple was obtained not through the Mediterranean mollusc, but purple gromwell.  The dye obtained did not easily adhere to fabrics, making purple fabrics expensive. Purple became a fashionable color in the state of Qi (齊, 1046 BC–221 BC) because its ruler developed a preference for it. As a result, the price of a purple spoke of fabric was in excess of five times that of a plain spoke. His minister, Guan Zhong (管仲), eventually convinced him to relinquish this preference.

China was the first culture to develop a synthetic purple color. 

Old hypothesis suggested links between Chinese purple and blue with Egyptian blue, however, molecular structure analysis and evidences such as the absence of lead in Egyptian blue and the lack of examples of Egyptian blue in China, argued against the early hypothesis. The use of quartz, barium, and lead components in ancient Chinese glass and Han purple and Han blue has been used to suggest a connection between glassmaking and the manufacture of pigments, and to prove for the independent Chinese invention.  Taoist alchemists may have developed Han purple from their knowledge of glassmaking.

The lead is used by pigment maker to lower the melting point of the barium in Han Purple.

Purple was regarded as a secondary color in ancient China.  In classical times, secondary colors were not as highly prized as the five primary colors of the Chinese spectrum, and purple was used to allude to impropriety, compared to crimson, which was deemed a primary color and thus symbolized legitimacy.  Nevertheless, by the 6th Century, purple was ranked above crimson.  Several changes to the ranks of colors occurred after that time.

Purple in the Byzantine Empire and Carolingian Europe 
Through the early Christian era, the rulers of the Byzantine Empire continued the use of purple as the imperial color, for diplomatic gifts, and even for imperial documents and the pages of the Bible. Gospel manuscripts were written in gold lettering on parchment that was colored Tyrian purple.
Empresses gave birth in the Purple Chamber, and the emperors born there were known as "born to the purple," to separate them from emperors who won or seized the title through political intrigue or military force. Bishops of the Byzantine church wore white robes with stripes of purple, while government officials wore squares of purple fabric to show their rank.

In western Europe, the Emperor Charlemagne was crowned in 800 wearing a mantle of Tyrian purple, and was buried in 814 in a shroud of the same color, which still exists (see below). However, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the color lost its imperial status. The great dye works of Constantinople were destroyed, and gradually scarlet, made with dye from the cochineal insect, became the royal color in Europe.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance 
In 1464, Pope Paul II decreed that cardinals should no longer wear Tyrian purple, and instead wear scarlet, from kermes and alum, since the dye from Byzantium was no longer available. Bishops and archbishops, of a lower status than cardinals, were assigned the color purple, but not the rich Tyrian purple. They wore cloth dyed first with the less expensive indigo blue, then overlaid with red made from kermes dye.

While purple was worn less frequently by Medieval and Renaissance kings and princes, it was worn by the professors of many of Europe's new universities.  Their robes were modeled after those of the clergy, and they often wore square/violet or purple/violet caps and robes, or black robes with purple/violet trim. Purple/violet robes were particularly worn by students of divinity.

Purple and/or violet also played an important part in the religious paintings of the Renaissance.  Angels and the Virgin Mary were often portrayed wearing purple or violet robes.

18th and 19th centuries 
In the 18th century, purple was still worn on occasion by Catherine the Great and other rulers, by bishops and, in lighter shades, by members of the aristocracy, but rarely by ordinary people, because of its high cost. But in the 19th century, that changed.

In 1856, an eighteen-year-old British chemistry student named William Henry Perkin was trying to make a synthetic quinine. His experiments produced instead the first synthetic aniline dye, a purple shade called mauveine, shortened simply to mauve. It took its name from the mallow flower, which is the same color. The new color quickly became fashionable, particularly after Queen Victoria wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862. Prior to Perkin's discovery, mauve was a color which only the aristocracy and rich could afford to wear. Perkin developed an industrial process, built a factory, and produced the dye by the ton, so almost anyone could wear mauve. It was the first of a series of modern industrial dyes which completely transformed both the chemical industry and fashion.

Purple was popular with the pre-Raphaelite painters in Britain, including Arthur Hughes, who loved bright colors and romantic scenes.

20th and 21st centuries 
At the turn of the century, purple was a favorite color of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, who flooded his pictures with sensual purples and violets.

In the 20th century, purple retained its historic connection with royalty; George VI (1896–1952), wore purple in his official portrait, and it was prominent in every feature of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, from the invitations to the stage design inside Westminster Abbey. But at the same time, it was becoming associated with social change; with the Women's Suffrage movement for the right to vote for women in the early decades of the century, with Feminism in the 1970s, and with the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s.

In the early 20th century, purple, green, and white were the colors of the Women's Suffrage movement, which fought to win the right to vote for women, finally succeeding with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.  Later, in the 1970s, in a tribute to the Suffragettes, it became the color of the women's liberation movement.

In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, prisoners who were members of non-conformist religious groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, were required to wear a purple triangle.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was also associated with counterculture, psychedelics, and musicians like Jimi Hendrix with his 1967 song "Purple Haze", or the English rock band of Deep Purple which formed in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, it was featured in the song and album Purple Rain (1984) by the American musician Prince.

The Purple Rain Protest was a protest against apartheid that took place in Cape Town, South Africa on 2 September 1989, in which a police water cannon with purple dye sprayed thousands of demonstrators. This led to the slogan The Purple Shall Govern.

The violet or purple necktie became very popular at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, particularly among political and business leaders. It combined the assertiveness and confidence of a red necktie with the sense of peace and cooperation of a blue necktie, and it went well with the blue business suit worn by most national and corporate leaders.

In science and nature

Optics 
The meanings of the color terms violet and purple varies even among native speakers of English, for example between United Kingdom and United States  Since this Wikipedia page contains contributions from authors from different countries and different native languages, it is likely to be not consistent in the use of the color terms violet and purple.
According to some speakers/authors of English, purple, unlike violet, is not one of the colors of the visible spectrum. It was not one of the colors of the rainbow identified by Isaac Newton, although in earlier versions of Newton's work the word purple was used where violet was used in the final version. According to some authors, purple does not have its own wavelength of light.  For this reason, it is sometimes called a non-spectral color.  It exists in culture and art, but not, in the same way that violet does, in optics. According to some speakers of English, purple is simply a combination, in various proportions, of two primary colors, red and blue. According to other speakers of English, the same range of colors is called violet.

In some textbooks of color theory, and depending on the geographical-cultural origin of the author, a "purple" is defined as any non-spectral color between violet and red (excluding violet and red themselves). The spectral colors violet and indigo would in that case not be purples. For other speakers of English, these colors are purples.

In the traditional color wheel long used by painters, purple is placed between crimson and violet. However, also here there is much variation in color terminology depending on cultural background of the painters and authors, and sometimes the term violet is used and placed in between red and blue on the traditional color wheel. In a slightly different variation, on the color wheel, purple is placed between magenta and violet. This shade is sometimes called electric purple (See shades of purple).

In the RGB color model, named for the colors red, green, and blue, used to create all the colors on a computer screen or television, the range of purples is created by mixing red and blue light of different intensities on a black screen. The standard HTML color purple is created by red and blue light of equal intensity, at a brightness that is halfway between full power and darkness.

In color printing, purple is sometimes represented by the color magenta, or sometimes by mixing magenta with red or blue.  It can also be created by mixing just red and blue alone, but in that case the purple is less bright, with lower
saturation or intensity.  A less bright purple can also be created with light or paint by adding a certain quantity of the third primary color (green for light or yellow for pigment).

On a chromaticity diagram, the straight line connecting the extreme spectral colors (red and violet) is known as the line of purples (or 'purple boundary'); it represents one limit of human color perception. The color magenta used in the CMYK printing process is near the center of the line of purples, but most people associate the term "purple" with a somewhat bluer tone, such as is displayed by the color "electric purple" (a color also directly on the line of purples), shown below. Some common confusion exists concerning the color names "purple" and "violet". Purple is a mixture of red and blue light, whereas violet is a spectral color.

On the CIE xy chromaticity diagram, violet is on the curved edge in the lower left, while purples are on the straight line connecting the extreme colors red and violet; this line is known as the line of purples, or the purple line.

Pigments 
Hematite and manganese are the oldest pigments used for the color purple. They were used by Neolithic artists in the form of sticks, like charcoal, or ground and powdered and mixed with fat, and used as a paint. Hematite is a reddish iron oxide which, when ground coarsely, makes a purple pigment. One such pigment is caput mortuum, whose name is also used in reference to mummy brown. The latter is another pigment containing hematite and historically produced with the use of mummified corpses. Some of its compositions produce a purple color and may be called "mummy violet". Manganese was also used in Roman times to color glass purple.
Han purple was the first synthetic purple pigment, invented in China in about 700 BC. It was used in wall paintings and pottery and other applications.  In color, it was very close to indigo, which had a similar chemical structure.  Han purple was very unstable, and sometimes was the result of the chemical breakdown of Han blue.

During the Middle Ages, artists usually made purple by combining red and blue pigments; most often blue azurite or lapis-lazuli with red ochre, cinnabar, or minium. They also combined lake colors made by mixing dye with powder; using woad or indigo dye for the blue, and dye made from cochineal for the red.

Cobalt violet was the first modern synthetic color in the purple family, manufactured in 1859. It was found, along with cobalt blue, in the palette of Claude Monet, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. It was stable, but had low tinting power and was expensive, so quickly went out of use.
Manganese violet was a stronger color than cobalt violet, and replaced it on the market.
Quinacridone violet, one of a modern synthetic organic family of colors, was discovered in 1896 but not marketed until 1955.  It is sold today under a number of brand names.

Dyes 
The most famous purple dye in the ancient world was Tyrian purple, made from a type of sea snail called the murex, found around the Mediterranean. (See history section above).

In western Polynesia, residents of the islands made a purple dye similar to Tyrian purple from the sea urchin.  In Central America, the inhabitants made a dye from a different sea snail, the purpura, found on the coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua.  The Mayans used this color to dye fabric for religious ceremonies, while the Aztecs used it for paintings of ideograms, where it symbolized royalty.

In the Middle Ages, those who worked with blue and black dyes belonged to separate guilds from those who worked with red and yellow dyes, and were often forbidden to dye any other colors than those of their own guild.  Most purple fabric was made by the dyers who worked with red, and who used dye from madder or cochineal, so Medieval violet colors were inclined toward red.

Orcein, or purple moss, was another common purple dye. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and was made from a Mediterranean lichen called archil or dyer's moss (Roccella tinctoria), combined with an ammoniac, usually urine. Orcein began to achieve popularity again in the 19th century, when violet and purple became the color of demi-mourning, worn after a widow or widower had worn black for a certain time, before he or she returned to wearing ordinary colors.

From the Middle Ages onward, purple dyes for the clothing of common people were often made from the blackberry or other red fruit of the genus rubus, or from the mulberry.  All of these dyes were more reddish than bluish, and faded easily with washing and exposure to sunlight.

A popular new dye which arrived in Europe from the New World during the Renaissance was made from the wood of the logwood tree (Haematoxylum campechianum), which grew in Spanish Mexico.  Depending on the different minerals added to the dye, it produced a blue, red, black or, with the addition of alum, a purple color,  It made a good color, but, like earlier dyes, it did not resist sunlight or washing.

In the 18th century, chemists in England, France and Germany began to create the first synthetic dyes.  Two synthetic purple dyes were invented at about the same time. Cudbear is a dye extracted from orchil lichens that can be used to dye wool and silk, without the use of mordant.  Cudbear was developed by Dr Cuthbert Gordon of Scotland: production began in 1758, The lichen is first boiled in a solution of ammonium carbonate. The mixture is then cooled and ammonia is added and the mixture is kept damp for 3–4 weeks. Then the lichen is dried and ground to powder. The manufacture details were carefully protected, with a ten-feet high wall being built around the manufacturing facility, and staff consisting of Highlanders sworn to secrecy.

French purple was developed in France at about the same time.  The lichen is extracted by urine or ammonia. Then the extract is acidified, the dissolved dye precipitates and is washed. Then it is dissolved in ammonia again, the solution is heated in air until it becomes purple, then it is precipitated with calcium chloride; the resulting dye was more solid and stable than other purples.

Cobalt violet is a synthetic pigment that was invented in the second half of the 19th century, and is made by a similar process as cobalt blue, cerulean blue  and cobalt green.  It is the violet pigment most commonly used today by artists. In spite of its name, this pigment produces a purple rather than violet color 

Mauveine, also known as aniline purple and Perkin's mauve, was the first synthetic organic chemical dye, discovered serendipitously in 1856.
Its chemical name is
3-amino-2,±9-dimethyl-5-phenyl-7-(p-tolylamino)phenazinium acetate.

Fuchsine was another synthetic dye made shortly after mauveine.  It produced a brilliant fuchsia color.

In the 1950s, a new family of purple and violet synthetic organic pigments called quinacridone came onto the market. It had originally been discovered in 1896, but were not synthetized until 1936, and not manufactured until the 1950s. The colors in the group range from deep red to bluish purple in color, and have the molecular formula C20H12N2O2. They have strong resistance to sunlight and washing, and are widely used today in oil paints, water colors, and acrylics, as well as in automobile coatings and other industrial coatings.

Animals

Anthocyanins 
Certain grapes, eggplants, pansies and other fruits, vegetables and flowers may appear purple due to the presence of natural pigments called anthocyanins. These pigments are found in the leaves, roots, stems, vegetables, fruits and flowers of all plants. They aid photosynthesis by blocking harmful wavelengths of light that would damage the leaves. In flowers, the purple anthocyanins help attract insects who pollinate the flowers. Not all anthocyanins are purple; they vary in color from red to purple to blue, green, or yellow, depending upon the level of their pH.

Plants and flowers 
Purple needlegrass is the state grass of California.

Microbiology 
Purple bacteria are proteobacteria that are phototrophic, that is, capable of producing energy through photosynthesis.

In April 2007 it was suggested that early archaea may have used retinal, a purple pigment, instead of chlorophyll, to extract energy from the sun. If so, large areas of the ocean and shoreline would have been colored purple; this is called the Purple Earth hypothesis.

Astronomy 
 One of the stars in the Pleiades, called Pleione, is sometimes called Purple Pleione because, being a fast spinning star, it has a purple hue caused by its blue-white color being obscured by a spinning ring of electrically excited red hydrogen gas.
The Purple Forbidden enclosure is a name used in traditional Chinese astronomy for those Chinese constellations that surround the North Celestial Pole.

Geography 
Purple Mountain is located on the eastern side of Nanjing. Its peaks are often found enveloped in purple clouds at dawn and dusk, hence comes its name "Purple Mountain". The Purple Mountain Observatory is located there.
Purple Mountain in County Kerry, Ireland, takes its name from the color of the shivered slate on its summit.
Purple Mountain in Wyoming (el. ) is a mountain peak in the southern section of the Gallatin Range in Yellowstone National Park.
Purple Mountain, Alaska
Purple Mountain, Oregon
Purple Mountain, Washington
Purple Peak, Colorado

Purple mountains phenomenon 

It has been observed that the greater the distance between a viewers eyes and mountains, the lighter and more blue or purple they will appear. This phenomenon, long recognized by Leonardo da Vinci and other painters, is called aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective. The more distant the mountains are, the less contrast the eye sees between the mountains and the sky.

The bluish color is caused by an optical effect called Rayleigh scattering. The sunlit sky is blue because air scatters short-wavelength light more than longer wavelengths. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light. The result is that the human eye perceives blue when looking toward parts of the sky other than the sun.

At sunrise and sunset, the light is passing through the atmosphere at a lower angle, and traveling a greater distance through a larger volume of air. Much of the green and blue is scattered away, and more red light comes to the eye, creating the colors of the sunrise and sunset and making the mountains look purple.

The phenomenon is referenced in the song "America the Beautiful", where the lyrics refer to "purple mountains' majesty" among other features of the United States landscape. A Crayola crayon called Purple Mountain Majesty in reference to the lyric was first formulated in 1993.

Mythology 
Julius Pollux, a Greek grammarian who lived in the second century AD, attributed the discovery of purple to the Phoenician god and guardian of the city of Tyre, Heracles. According to his account, while walking along the shore with the nymph Tyrus, the god's dog bit into a murex shell, causing his mouth to turn purple. The nymph subsequently requested that Heracles create a garment for her of that same color, with Heracles obliging her demands giving birth to Tyrian purple.

Associations and symbolism

Royalty 
In Europe, since the time that the Roman emperors wore a Tyrian purple (purpura) toga praetexta, purple has been the color most associated with power and royalty. The British Royal Family and other European royalty still use it as a ceremonial color on special occasions. In Japan, purple is associated with the emperor and Japanese aristocracy.

Piety, faith, penitence, and theology 
In the West, purple or violet is the color most associated with piety and religious faith. In AD 1464, shortly after the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, which terminated the supply of Tyrian purple to Roman Catholic Europe, Pope Paul II decreed that cardinals should henceforth wear scarlet instead of purple, the scarlet being dyed with expensive cochineal. Bishops were assigned the color amaranth, being a pale and pinkish purple made then from a less-expensive mixture of indigo and cochineal.

In the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic liturgy, purple symbolizes penitence; Anglican and Catholic priests wear a purple stole when they hear confession and a purple stole and chasuble during Advent and Lent.  Since the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5, priests may wear purple vestments, but may still wear black ones, when officiating at funerals. The Roman Missal permits black, purple (violet), or white vestments for the funeral Mass. White is worn when a child dies before the age of reason. Students and faculty of theology also wear purple academic dress for graduations and other university ceremonies.

Purple is also often worn by senior pastors of Protestant churches and bishops of the Anglican Communion.

The color purple is also associated with royalty in Christianity, being one of the three traditional offices of Jesus Christ, i. e. king, although such a symbolism was assumed from the earlier Roman association or at least also employed by the ancient Romans.

Vanity, extravagance, individualism 
In Europe and America, purple is the color most associated with vanity, extravagance, and individualism.  Among the seven major sins, it represents vanity.  It is a color which is used to attract attention.

The artificial, materialism and beauty 
Purple is the color most often associated with the artificial and the unconventional.  It is the major color that occurs the least frequently in nature, and was the first color to be synthesized.

Ambiguity and ambivalence 
Purple is the color most associated with ambiguity.  Like other colors made by combining two primary colors, it is seen as uncertain and equivocal.

Mourning 
In Britain, purple is sometimes associated with mourning.  In Victorian times,  close relatives wore black for the first year following a death ("deep mourning"), and then replaced it with purple or dark green trimmed with black.  This is rarely practised today.

In culture and society

Asian culture 
 The Chinese word for purple, zi, is connected with the North Star, Polaris, or zi Wei in Chinese. In Chinese astrology, the North Star was the home of the Celestial Emperor, the ruler of the heavens. The area around the North Star is called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure in Chinese astronomy. For that reason the Forbidden City in Beijing was also known as the Purple Forbidden City (zi Jin cheng).
Purple was a popular color introduced into Japanese dress during the Heian period (794–1185). The dye was made from the root of the alkanet plant (Anchusa officinalis), also known as murasaki in Japanese. At about the same time, Japanese painters began to use a pigment made from the same plant.

In Thailand, widows in mourning wear the color purple. Purple is also associated with Saturday on the Thai solar calendar.

Engineering 
The color purple plays a significant role in the traditions of engineering schools across Canada. Purple is also the color of the Engineering Corp in the British Military.

Idioms and expressions 
Purple prose refers to pretentious or overly embellished writing. For example, a paragraph containing an excessive number of long and unusual words is called a purple passage.
Born to the purple means someone who is born into a life of wealth and privilege. It originally was used to describe the rulers of the Byzantine Empire.
A purple patch is a period of exceptional success or good luck. The origins are obscure, but it may refer to the symbol of success of the Byzantine Court. Bishops in Byzantium wore a purple patch on their costume as a symbol of rank.
Purple haze refers to a state of mind induced by psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD.
Wearing purple is a military slang expression in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for an officer who is serving in a joint assignment with another service, such as an Army officer on assignment to the Navy. The officer is symbolically putting aside his or her traditional uniform color and exclusive loyalty to their service during the joint assignment, though in fact they continue to wear their own service's uniform.
Purple squirrel is a term used by employment recruiters to describe a job candidate with precisely the right education, experience, and qualifications that perfectly fits a job's multifaceted requirements. The assumption is that the perfect candidate is as rare as a real-life purple squirrel.

Military 
The Purple Heart is a United States military decoration awarded in the name of the President to those who have been wounded or killed during their service.

Politics 
In United States politics, a purple state is a state roughly balanced between Republicans (generally symbolized by red in the 21st century) and Democrats (symbolized by blue).
In the politics of the Netherlands, Purple () means a coalition government consisting of liberals and social democrats (symbolized by the colors blue and red, respectively), as opposed to the more common coalitions of the Christian Democrats with one of the other two. Between 1994 and 2002 there were two Purple cabinets, both led by Prime Minister Wim Kok.
In the politics of Belgium, as with the Netherlands, a purple government includes liberal and social-democratic parties in coalition. Belgium was governed by Purple governments from 1999 to 2007 under the leadership of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt.
Purple is the primary color used by many European and American political parties, including Volt Europa, the UK Independence Party, the Social Democrats in the Republic of Ireland, the Liberal People's Party in Norway, and the United States Pirate Party. The Left party in Germany, whose primary color is red, is traditionally portrayed in purple on election maps to distinguish it from the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
In the United Kingdom, the color scheme for the suffragette movement in Britain and Ireland was designed with purple for loyalty and dignity, white for purity, and green for hope.

Rhyme 

In the English language, the word "purple" has only one perfect rhyme, curple. Others are obscure perfect rhymes, such as hirple.
Robert Burns rhymes purple with curple in his Epistle to Mrs. Scott.
Examples of imperfect rhymes or non-word rhymes with purple:
 In the song Grace Kelly by Mika the word purple is rhymed with "hurtful".
 In his hit song "Dang Me," Roger Miller sings these lines:

Sexuality 
Purple is sometimes associated with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. It is the symbolic color worn on Spirit Day, a commemoration that began in 2010 to show support for young people who are bullied because of their sexual orientation. Purple is closely associated with bisexuality, largely in part to the bisexual pride flag which combines pink – representing homosexuality – and blue – representing heterosexuality – to create the bisexual purple. The purple hand is another symbol sometimes used by the LGBT community during parades and demonstrations.

Sports and games 
The National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns and Sacramento Kings use purple as their primary color.
In the Indian Premier League, purple is the primary color of the Kolkata Knight Riders.
The National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings used purple as one of their primary colors.
In Major League Baseball, purple is one of the primary colors for the Colorado Rockies.
In the National Football League, the Minnesota Vikings and Baltimore Ravens use purple as main colors.
The Australian Football League's Fremantle Football Club use purple as one of their primary colors.
In association football (soccer), Italian Serie A club ACF Fiorentina, Belgian Pro League club and former Europa League winner R.S.C. Anderlecht, French Ligue 1 club Toulouse FC and Ligue 2 club FC Istres, Spanish La Liga club Real Valladolid, Austrian Football Bundesliga club FK Austria Wien, Hungarian Nemzeti Bajnokság I club Újpest FC, Slovenian PrvaLiga club NK Maribor, former Romanian Liga I clubs FC Politehnica Timișoara and FC Argeș Pitești, Andorran Primera Divisió club CE Principat, German club Tennis Borussia Berlin, Italian club A.S.D. Legnano Calcio 1913, Swedish club Fässbergs IF, Australian A-League Club Perth Glory and American Major League Soccer club Orlando City use purple as one of their primary colors.
The Melbourne Storm from Australia's National Rugby League use purple as one of their primary colors.
Costa Rica's Primera División soccer team Deportivo Saprissa's main color is purple (actually a burgundy like shade), and their nickname is the "Monstruo Morado", or "Purple Monster".
In tennis, the official colors of the Wimbledon championships are deep green and purple (traditionally called mauve).
In American college athletics, Louisiana State University, Kansas State University, Texas Christian University, the University of Central Arkansas, Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and East Carolina University all have purple as one of their main team colors.
The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Canada, have purple as one of its main team colors.
Purple is the color of the ball in Snooker Plus with a 10-point value.
In the game of pool, purple is the color of the 4-solid and the 12-striped balls.

Business 
The British chocolate company Cadbury chose purple as it was Queen Victoria's favourite color. The company trademarked the color purple for chocolates with registrations in 1995 and 2004. However, the validity of these trademarks is the matter of an ongoing legal dispute following objections by Nestlé.

In flags 
 Purple or violet appear in the flags of only two modern sovereign nations, and are merely ancillary colors in both cases. The Flag of Dominica features a sisserou parrot, a national symbol, while the Flag of Nicaragua displays a rainbow in the center, as part of the coat of arms of Nicaragua.
 The lower band of the flag of the second Spanish republic (1931–39) was colored a tone of purple, to represent the common people as opposed to the red of the Spanish monarchy, unlike other nations of Europe where purple represented royalty and red represented the common people.
 In Japan, the prefecture of Tokyo's flag is purple, as is the flag of Ichikawa.
 Porpora, or purpure, a shade of purple, was added late to the list of colors of European heraldry. A purple lion was the symbol of the old Spanish Kingdom of León (910–1230), and it later appeared on the flag of Spain, when the Kingdom of Castile and Kingdom of León merged.

See also 

 Byzantium (color)
 Carmine (color)
 Cerise (color)
 Lavender (color)
 List of colors
 Orchid (color)
 Purple (cipher machine)
 Purple Francis
 Purple Mark
 Raspberry (color)
 Rose (color)
 Ruby (color)
 Shades of magenta
 Shades of purple
 Ultramarine
 Violet (color)

References

Further references 

 "The perception of color", from Schiffman, H.R. (1990). Sensation and perception: An integrated approach (3rd edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Notes 
 

Secondary colors
Quaternary colors
Shades of violet
Web colors