Color Names Reference

The Color Names Reference

This database combines seven major color naming systems into a single, searchable reference:

• CSS3 (139 colors) — The W3C web standard named colors, recognized by all browsers.
• ISCC-NBS (267 categories) — The Inter-Society Color Council / National Bureau of Standards scientific color naming system, published in 1955. The closest thing to an official color naming standard.
• X11 (231 colors) — The Unix X Window System color names, the ancestor of CSS named colors.
• Resene (1,280 colors) — New Zealand paint company color names, widely used for their practical, real-world naming.
• XKCD (949 colors) — Randall Munroe's 2010 crowdsourced color survey with 222,500 participants. Colloquial, natural-language color names.
• Crayola (135 colors) — Culturally familiar crayon names from Crayola.
• Community (meodai/color-names, MIT licensed, 6,072 colors) — Community-curated color names from thousands of contributors.

Every color is classified using the ISCC-NBS system — a scientific standard that assigns each color to one of 267 non-overlapping categories based on the Munsell color solid. This means colors are organized by perceptual relationships, not just alphabetical order.

Each color entry includes CIE L*a*b* and OKLCH perceptual coordinates, WCAG contrast ratios against white and black, and source attribution showing which naming systems recognize it. Paste any hex code in the search bar to find the nearest named colors.