What Colour Is This, Exactly? Naming Hex Codes in Plain English
Nobody reads #4F46E5 and pictures a colour. Say "indigo" and everyone sees roughly the same thing. The Colour Name Finder closes that gap by matching any colour to the nearest common name.
Where a name is more useful than a code
Talking to people who do not write CSS. A client, a printer, a colleague in marketing - all of them can discuss "a deep teal" and none of them can discuss a hex code.
Writing things down. Design notes, brand guidelines and handover documents are far easier to follow when the colours have names alongside their values.
Alt text and descriptions. Where a colour genuinely matters to understanding an image, a name is the only version that works for a screen reader.
Searching and sorting. Product listings, tags and filters need a word. Nobody filters by hex.
How the matching works
Every colour is a point in a three-dimensional space, and finding a name means finding the nearest labelled point. The result is the closest common name, not an exact one - most colours have no name of their own, so what you get is the nearest recognisable neighbour.
Two consequences follow. Very similar colours often return the same name, because the gaps between named colours are wide. And the name is a reasonable description rather than a definition - it is for communicating, not for specifying. Keep the hex in the brand document.
How to use it
Open the tool, pick or paste any colour, and you get its closest name back.
If what you have is an image rather than a value, pull the colours out of it first with the Image Colour Palette Extractor, then name the ones you want. And if you need the same colour in another notation, the Colour Converter handles that.
Naming is not the same as specifying
A name is for communicating; a hex code is for building. The two are not interchangeable, and the mistake worth avoiding is letting a name into a specification. "Our brand blue is navy" is the kind of sentence that produces three different blues across a website, a business card and a sign, because navy covers a wide range and everybody picks their own.
Use the name in conversation and the hex code in the document. The ideal brand note gives both: the code as the definition, the name so people can picture it without looking it up.
The same applies to alt text. Describing a product as deep burgundy helps a reader who cannot see the picture; quoting them a hex code does not.
Common questions
Why do two different colours give the same name?
Because named colours are sparse. Several nearby shades can share a nearest neighbour.
Are these the CSS named colours?
They come from common colour names. The CSS keyword list is small and skips a great deal of the spectrum.
Why does the name sometimes seem wrong?
Because the nearest name can still be some distance away. If the result surprises you, the colour is probably in a sparsely named part of the spectrum.
Are colour names standardised?
Only loosely. CSS defines around 140 keywords, but most naming libraries go well beyond that list and they do not always agree.
Put a name to a colour: