Colour name finder

Every name for a colour, each with how far it really is.

Most people would call it

azul

ΔE 1.9 from your colour: visible only side by side, if you look for it. In plain words, a vivid blue.

Yours #2563eb“azul” #1d5dec

What colour name finder is

A tool that gives a colour the name of the nearest entry in a list of named colours. Because almost no colour has a name of its own, the useful answer is the name together with how far its colour sits from yours, measured as a perceptual difference rather than a difference in hex digits.

What this tool does that others do not

  • Every name comes with its distance

    Each name is printed beside its CIEDE2000 difference from your colour and a plain reading of it, from indistinguishable to a different colour. A split swatch shows the two side by side, so a poetic name for a neighbouring shade cannot pass itself off as an exact match.

    Measured on 2,000 random colours: the nearest CSS keyword is a median ΔE 5.85 away, the nearest survey name 3.20, the nearest curated name 1.90, the nearest of all 31,918 names 1.15.

  • Four lists side by side, each one licensed

    The keyword you can type in a stylesheet, the name most people chose in a public survey, a hand-picked evocative name, and the nearest of every name in the full open list. Each row says which list it came from and under what licence, and no proprietary system ships at all.

    148 CSS keywords (139 distinct values), 921 survey names from 222,500 sessions, 4,961 curated and 31,918 total names under MIT.

  • Nearest by eye, not by digits

    Ranking by red, green and blue distance is the shortcut most finders take, and it often lands on the wrong name. Ranking here is perceptual, tested against the 34 published reference pairs for the formula.

    Against the CSS keywords, RGB distance picks a different name for 41.9% of random colours, a median 3.1 ΔE further away. Tailwind yellow-500 (#eab308) is goldenrod at 4.44, not orange at 9.31.

  • A palette named and exported in one pass

    Paste up to 24 colours and each one is named at once. The names become tokens for CSS custom properties, Tailwind v4 or v3, SCSS or design-token JSON, with clashing names suffixed rather than overwritten and each line noting its source and distance.

How to use it

  1. Enter or pick the colour

    Type a hex code, a CSS keyword or an rgb(), hsl() or oklch() value, use the picker, or in Chromium pick straight from the screen. On a wider screen, press R for a random colour.

  2. Read the distance before the name

    Under ΔE 1 the name is as good as exact. Between 2 and 5 it names a neighbour. Past 10 it names a different colour that happened to be nearest.

  3. Check whether the CSS keyword can stand in

    “Its name in every list” names the keyword and says plainly whether swapping your hex for it would be visible, before you open it. Inside, the keyword row carries the specification’s own caveats, such as darkgray being lighter than gray.

  4. Export the names as tokens

    Choose survey names, curated names or plain descriptions as token names, pick the format, and copy, under “Use it in code”. The bar at the foot of the screen copies the name or the hex (C) in one press, and on a wider screen its Export copies any format. Switch to the palette tab to name a whole set at once.

Worked examples

Real input, real figures.

Naming a brand blue honestly

You give it

#2563eb, the default colour of the tool.

You get

Survey name azul at ΔE 1.95, very close. CSS keyword royalblue at ΔE 2.53, close but visibly different, so not a stand-in. Plain description: vivid blue. Contrast 5.16:1 on white, so white text reads on it.

A name that contradicts its colour

You give it

#0063ec, a strong blue, looked up against the full list of 31,918 names.

You get

The nearest name is Old Gungeon Red, ΔE 1.25 away: a red name on a blue. The plain description, vivid blue, is worked out from the colour itself and cannot make that mistake.

Against a typical colour name lookup

AspectThis toolA typical lookup
MatchingCIEDE2000, tested on 34 reference pairsRGB distance, or not stated
Distance shownNumber and words for every nameNone
ListsCSS, survey, curated and full, side by sideOne list, source unstated
LicencesEvery list credited; nothing proprietaryRarely stated
Palettes and codeUp to 24 colours, five export formatsOne colour at a time
Reverse searchName to colour, typos forgivenExact name only, if at all

Guide

What it will not do

  • No Pantone, RAL or NCS matches: their data is sold or licensed by the companies that own it, and a lookup built on copied tables would be both unlicensed and unverifiable.
  • No ISCC-NBS lookup: its 267 centroids have no agreed sRGB values, so the descriptive name borrows its vocabulary instead.
  • Names are English only. The open lists include other languages, but mixing them into one nearest-name answer would make the answer harder to read.

A name is only as good as its distance

Every name list is a few thousand points scattered through sixteen million colours, so almost no colour has a name of its own. A finder that prints “Mirror Blue” for #2563EB is telling you about a different colour, #2B67F1, and not saying how different. Here that distance is the CIEDE2000 colour difference, the formula the CIE recommends for small differences, printed beside every name with a plain reading: under 1 nobody can tell them apart side by side; past 10 they are different colours.

The size of the list decides how close the nearest name usually is. Measured on 2,000 random colours, the nearest of the 148 CSS keywords sits a median ΔE 5.85 away, which is a visibly different colour; the 921 xkcd survey names used here a median 3.20; the curated list’s 1.90; the full 31,918-name list 1.15. That is why the CSS keyword is shown with a verdict on whether it can stand in for your hex: usually it cannot.

Why the nearest name is not the nearest hex

The quick way to find a nearest name is to treat red, green and blue as distances on a ruler. It is wrong surprisingly often, because equal steps in RGB are not equal steps to the eye. Against the CSS keywords, RGB distance picks a different name from CIEDE2000 for 41.9% of random colours, and its pick is a median 3.1 ΔE further away. Tailwind’s yellow-500, #EAB308, is a clear case: by eye and by CIEDE2000 it is goldenrod (ΔE 4.44); by RGB distance it is orange (ΔE 9.31).

The 2007 Name that Color script many sites still run adds HSL to RGB and measures hue in a straight line, so a red at the top of the hue circle is far from a red at the bottom. Against its own 1,566 names it disagrees with CIEDE2000 on 59.7% of random colours. For #00A806 it answers Japanese Laurel, ΔE 22.5 away, when Apple sits at ΔE 5.0 in the same list.

The name lists, and their licences

  • CSS keyword: CSS Color Module Level 4, §6.1 Named Colors (W3C). Source, licensed W3C Software and Document Licence. Ships with the page.
  • Survey name: xkcd colour survey by Randall Munroe, 222,500 sessions; 28 crude names removed. Source, licensed CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Ships with the page.
  • Curated name: color-name-list 14.51.0 "best of" by David Aerne and contributors. Source, licensed MIT. Loaded only when needed.
  • Any name: color-name-list 14.51.0 full list by David Aerne and contributors (includes names from chir.ag’s Name that Color). Source, licensed MIT. Loaded only when needed.

Not included, on purpose: Pantone, whose colour books need a paid Pantone Connect licence even inside Adobe’s apps since 2022; RAL, whose official digital values are sold by RAL gGmbH; and NCS, whose notations need a licence from NCS Colour AB. Look those up with their owners. The ISCC-NBS dictionary is missing for a different reason: its 267 centroids have no agreed sRGB values. The two published tables differ by a median ΔE 7.78, and one calls “White” #FFC9D7, a pink. The plain description borrows that system’s words instead, worked out from the colour itself.