To add to the complexity, to completely describe the color of an object, you'd have to describe how it would look under any given light. It would be a graph. It's the amount of light reflected at different wavelengths by a particular light source that gives an object its color. As an example, it's very possible to have something that looks purple under daylight, but blue under a 100w bulb.

In printing and industrial design, one solution is to use reference standard patches of color, Pantone is one example, to specify a color. That's a common way to let people talking about 'blue' talk about more or less the same shade of blue - pantone 359 for example. They also have standard reference lights. For color printing, having a monitor calibrated to a standard helps, but isn't all that great at referencing the color of a reflected color.