AbstractA procedure is described whereby the subset of Munsell colors of maximum chroma, which has been used by anthropologists to study color naming since Berlin and Kay in 1969, can be specified in theL,j,gcoordinate system developed more recently by the Uniform Color Scales Committee of the Optical Society of America. The latter permits a meaningful specification of the centroid location of colors named by each basic term. The procedure is validated by comparing centroids obtained from six subjects who named samples of both the Munsell and OSA sets, and its usefulness is illustrated by comparing data from a four‐year old who named only OSA samples and four‐ and two‐year‐olds who named only Munsell