2... qermez (contemporary Tehran pronunciation: ghermez), meaning 'red'. Above, popular Iranian children's TV character kolah ghermezi, 'red hat'. This appears to have happened in early Islamic times; in Middle Persian 'red' is 'sukhr' (New Persian sorkh). What about the worms?
3. Well, before the advent of synthetic #chemistry in the 2nd half of the 19th century, #dyes & pigments were mostly obtained from plant roots, or in certain cases, animals. The most famous is the 'imperial purple' obtained from the glands of Mediterranean sea snails. 
4. Above, Friedel-Crafts alkylation (1877), part of a process to produce anthraquinones, a key constituent of synthetic dyes. These chemicals are also found in so-called natural dyes, wch are in fact synthesized & then extracted in complicated artificial processes. Beginning with
5... a red insect. This one is Kermes vermilio, found around the shores of the #Mediterranean & on its islands. It is a parasitic #insect feeding on the leaves of the small evergreen oak, Quercus coccifera. An adult looks like this:
6. While Kermes vermilio is parasitic on evergreen oaks (called garrigue oaks in S. France), another arguably parasitic species, Homo sapiens, used to cultivate K. vermilio in great numbers, then kill, dry, & crush pregnant females (because the dye is concentrated in the eggs)...
7... to produce a brilliant & expensive red dye used to colour textiles. This was known as #kermes, whence the modern scientific name of the insect. And 'kermes' comes from qermez, or more immediately from Arabic qirmiz which comes from Persian qermez, from Sanskrit krimija.
9. Above: Kerria lacca, the Indian lac insect, from which were derived both red dye & the resin known as '#shellac'. The dye is secreted by the female insect. It is referred to in a #Sanskrit text on politics, the #Arthashastra, parts of which date back to the 4th century BC.
10. Like the dye from Kermes vermilio, the red dye from Kerria lacca (also produced in SE Asia) was extensively traded. It provided the red dye in this caftan from E. Iran or #Sogdia (present-day Uzbekistan/Tajikistan), 8th-9th centuries AD.
11. Another famous ancient & medieval red dye was '#Armenian #cochineal'. Not to be confused with cochineal, another red insect dye long exploited by American peoples & brought to Afro-Eurasia by European conquerors, Armenian cochineal comes from Porphyrophora hamelii:
12. Other Porphyrophora (Greek: 'purple-bearing') species were also used to extract red dyes. In Armenian the dye was known as 'vordan karmir', 'worm's red'. Which brings me back to the etymology. Sanskrit krimija, worm-made, became Persian, Arabic, Armenian qermez & similar...
13. As the above entry from Lane's 19th century Arabic lexicon implies, qirmiz/kermes actually gives us the English word 'crimson'. It also gives us the fabric cramoisie (French cramoisi - crimson) & the scientific terms carminic acid & kermesic acid... (Osterley Park, London)
14. Carminic acid makes Armenian, American, & (from another insect species), Polish cochineal red; kermesic acid makes Kermes vermilio red (& is also found in Polish cochineal). At the root of all these is the Sanskrit worm. (Kırmızı şarap, 'red wine' (Turkish), grapes not worms)
15. Amateur etymologists (& entomologists?) will spot that the 'krim' of 'krimija', the worm-made root of our reds, has a common origin with English 'worm' (& similar words in Germanic languages), Persian 'kerm', & Latin vermis & its Romance derivatives. So Kermes vermilio...
16... means 'Worm little worm'. 'Vermilio' gives us 'vermillion', the brilliant red pigment, which, just to confuse things, was not made of 'worms' at all, but generally a mineral extract (cinnabar), although a Chinese version was taken from a tree.
