Random Color Generator

These are the 141 names, not a palette someone liked. Every name here is one a browser will accept as a colour value — type rebeccapurple and you get exactly #663399. That makes the list checkable and fixed: it is defined by the CSS Color specification, not by taste.

Four pairs are the same colour under two names. aqua and cyan are both #00FFFF; fuchsia and magenta are both #FF00FF. Both names in each pair are listed, because both work, and pretending there are two colours there would be wrong. The gray spellings also each have a grey twin that browsers accept — darkgrey, dimgrey, lightgrey, slategrey and the rest — which is why some counts of this list say 148 rather than {N}.

Some of the names are simply wrong, and that is part of the history. darkgray (#A9A9A9) is lighter than gray (#808080). lightgoldenrodyellow is barely yellow. The names came from X11 on Unix workstations in the 1980s, were adopted by browsers, and can never be corrected now because pages depend on them.

rebeccapurple has a story. It was added to the specification in 2014 in memory of Rebecca Meyer, the six-year-old daughter of the web standards writer Eric Meyer. It is the only colour in the list named after a person.

The family column is computed, not curated. Each colour's hue decides its group, with two extra rules: anything with almost no saturation is black, grey or white by its lightness, and a dark orange is a brown. That is the whole classifier, and stating it is the point — nothing drifts as the list changes, and no two similar colours land in different families because someone judged them on different days. It also means the pale colours sit with their hue: antiquewhite is a pale orange and is filed as one.