Bone is sort of halfway between a true beige and white. Like beige, it can also be slightly yellowish or slightly tan.

A continuum would be:

White
Off-white
Eggshell
Ivory
Ecru
Bone
Beige
Tan
"Neutral"
Luggage (on the orange side)/Taupe (on the purple side)
Brown

There is some drift and overlap in there. Different people have different things in mind, and the "pros" who make paint chips and name colors on descriptions in stores, usually consult their inner dictionaries rather than some master list of names linked to a Pantone deck, making it difficult to pin down. The most solidly set color names are the ones you find in the 72 color box of Crayolas (only Crayola brand, not other crayons). Otherwise people refer to RGB/CMYK/HTML number formulas, the Pantone deck or some other common designation to communicate a particular hue rather than relying on words.

For understanding the article, it means light beige.

To me - bone has an underlying brown (beige) to it. Off-white can have any number of underlying colours to it - it can have yellow, pink, blue, green etc. The problem with off-white is seeing the underlying colour in it and working with it.

plllog -- thanks so much for offering us the white to brown spectrum/range.
That is very helpful.
I'd always wondered how all the bones and beiges
related to each other in a general way.

What about linen and biscuit?
Casey

If the caulk we bought at Lowe's the other night is any indication, 'bisquit' is so close to white that it might as well be white. We had to go back to buy almond caulk for our new bone sink.

(All this work is being done in the bathrooms of a house we want to sell--no exciting kitchen porn there) (and I still do like the kitchen there, although knowing all I know now, I'd remodel it differently--but that was 15 years ago!)

Biscuit is less sure. It's used more in trade than anywhere else. The "biscuit" I've seen the most is kind of the color of balsa wood, though it can just as easily be the toasty white of that caulk.

Similarly, unbleached linen, by definition, is ecru. The commercial "linen" color can mean white table linen color, which is a dull white. It can also mean a "natural" linen color, which is more like flax (what linen is made out of), and pretty beige. Unbleached linen broadcloth is ecru. And "linen" is also used for a darker, yellower version of ecru. Again, it's used more for products than in common speach, and used to denote a finish texture as much as a color.

P.S. to Francoise and all,

I was just talking about the general designations of the colors in that continuum in the language. As I said before, the relative positions aren't set in stone. People have their own ideas of how they want to use the words, and what they're thinking of when they say them. Maybe it's what Grandma meant. Maybe it's Mom's favorite pumps. Maybe it's the Crayolas. Maybe it's a word the ex-girlfriend said that some guy just slaps on a can of paint because he kind of remembers the word.