Pink

Pink is a pale red color; the use of the word for the color was first recorded in the late 17th century, describing the flowers of pinks, flowering plants in the genus Dianthus. Pink itself is a combination of red and white. Other tints of pink may be combinations of rose and white, magenta and white, or orange and white.

Roseus is a Latin word meaning "rosy" or "pink." Lucretius used the word to describe the dawn in his epic poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). The word is also used in the binomial names of several species, such as the Rosy Starling (Sturnus roseus) and Catharanthus roseus.

In the 17th century, however, the word pink was also used to describe a greenish or yellowish color. Thomas Jenner's A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing (1652) categorizes "Pink & blew bice" amongst the greens, and specifies several admixtures of greenish colors made with pink -- e.g. "Grasse-green is made of Pink and Bice, it is shadowed with Indigo and Pink ... French-green of Pink and Indico [shadowed with] Indico" In William Salmon's Polygraphice (1673), "Pink yellow" is mentioned amongst the chief yellow pigments, and the reader is instructed to mix it with either Saffron or Ceruse for "sad" or "light" shades thereof, respectively.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink