I never knew the difference between purple and violet, all I know is that purple, pink, magenta,etc are the “colours” we see when our red and blue cones are activated at once. But Violet is considered a part of the light spectrum? They look the same to me.
In: Physics
To be clear though, the difference is a definition used in specific technical disciplines. In common usage, they are just similar shades of color.
Technical fields often take words from common language and give them specific definitions for use in the field. For example, “work” has specific definitions in physics, which is force times distance. So if you’re standing still holding something heavy, you’re not doing any work in the technical sense, but it’s still work in the ordinary sense. The physics definition isn’t universally “more correct” just different.
So don’t go all “well actually” on your friend when they’re talking about painting their accent wall violet.
I’ll also point out that there are tons of colors that you can make either with a single wavelength of light OR by combining multiple wavelengths. For example, yellow can be a single wavelength between red and green, or just a mixture of red and green. This is true of most colors we see.
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