Who Names Colors?

Somebody decided that a particular pale orange would be called Dandelion, that a specific blue would be Cerulean, and that #663399 would answer to rebeccapurple in every web browser on earth. None of those people worked for the same organisation, and none of them had authority over the others.

Color naming has no central registry. What it has instead is four large systems, each naming colors for a different audience, by different rules, with different stakes — and each producing names that leak into everyday speech as though they were facts about the world.

Pantone: naming for reproduction

Pantone's business is not naming colors. It is making sure that a color specified in one place comes out identically somewhere else — that a designer in Milan and a printer in Ohio produce the same red. The Pantone Matching System does that with standardised ink formulations and reference numbers, and the numbers, not the names, are the load-bearing part.

The naming most people know is the Color of the Year, which began when Pantone selected Cerulean 15-4020 in 1999 for the year 2000 — a calm sky blue chosen to open the millennium. The exercise has run annually since, and has produced both durable entries and much-mocked ones.

The process is a committee. Reporting consistently puts the Pantone Color Institute group at around forty people, meeting over the course of a year, weighing signals from fashion collections, film, art, travel patterns, technology and social movements. There is no instrument involved. It is a forecast of collective mood, published with enough confidence that paint companies, upholstery manufacturers and packaging designers move real inventory behind it.

Which is worth noticing. The Color of the Year is partly a prediction and partly a cause of the thing it predicts. Announce that a shade is next year's color, and enough manufacturers act on it that the announcement becomes true.

Crayola: naming for children

Crayola's constraint is unusual: the names have to work for someone who cannot yet read reliably, and they have to be fun. That produces a vocabulary — Burnt Sienna, Macaroni and Cheese, Razzmatazz, Outer Space — that has almost nothing in common with the industrial systems.

Crayola also does something the other systems mostly avoid: it retires colors in public. When Dandelion was retired in 2017 it was treated as news, complete with a farewell tour, and the replacement blue was named Bluetiful by public vote. Earlier retirements have been more fraught. Flesh was renamed Peach in 1962 after civil-rights criticism of the idea that one shade could be "flesh," and Indian Red became Chestnut in 1999 after persistent misreading of a name that had referred to a pigment from India.

Those changes are the clearest evidence that color names are cultural objects rather than technical ones. A wavelength does not become offensive. A name does.

Paint companies: naming to sell

Walk a paint aisle and you are reading the output of dedicated naming teams at Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, Farrow & Ball and their competitors. The names are doing commercial work, and the industry knows precisely how much.

Two nearly identical off-whites will sell at measurably different rates depending on whether one is called Antique White and the other Alabaster. The name supplies what the chip cannot: a setting, a mood, an implied room. Farrow & Ball built an identity on names that are almost jokes about this — Elephant's Breath, Mole's Breath, Dead Salmon — and the strategy works because a customer repeating the name to a friend is doing the advertising.

The industry constraint is that names must not overpromise. A paint named for a place it does not resemble generates returns. So the teams work within a rough grammar: material (Linen, Slate), place (Tuscan, Nantucket), time of day (Dawn, Twilight), and food, which appears constantly because it is the vocabulary everyone already shares for subtle color distinctions.

The web: names nobody designed

The strangest system is the one developers use daily. Write color: papayawhip in a stylesheet and every browser in the world renders #FFEFD5. Around 140 named values work this way.

They were not designed. Sixteen come from the original VGA palette by way of early HTML: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, yellow. The rest were inherited from the X11 color list used on Unix systems, adopted into SVG and then into CSS largely because they were already there.

The inheritance is visible in the seams. There are four shades of the invented word "gainsboro"-adjacent grey and none of several genuinely common colors. Both gray and grey work, as do aqua and cyan, which is why the count is quoted as 140, 147 or 148 depending on whether aliases are counted separately. And darkgray is lighter than gray, an inconsistency that has survived every attempt to fix it because too much existing code depends on the current behaviour.

That last detail says something true about naming generally. Once a name is in use, correctness stops being the deciding factor. Continuity wins.

The one color named for a person

In June 2014, the CSS Working Group added a color to the specification for a reason that had nothing to do with technology.

Rebecca Meyer, daughter of the web developer Eric Meyer, died of brain cancer on her sixth birthday. Eric was widely known in the web community — his writing had taught a generation of developers how CSS worked — and the community had followed Rebecca's illness. Purple was her favourite color.

The proposal was to add #663399, a purple Eric had used, under the name beccapurple. Eric accepted with one correction. A few weeks before she died, Rebecca had announced that Becca was a baby name, and that once she was six everyone should call her Rebecca. So the color was named rebeccapurple.

Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft all agreed to implement it, and it shipped. As the co-editor of the CSS Color specification noted at the time, it was the first color in the specification named in honour of a person. It is still the only one. It sits in the same list as papayawhip and gainsboro, technically unremarkable, and it will be there for as long as the web renders color.

What the four systems have in common

Set them side by side and the shared logic is clear. In each case a color acquired a name because a specific group needed to refer to it and agreed on what to call it. Pantone needed a printer and a designer to mean the same thing. Crayola needed a six-year-old to ask for a crayon. Paint companies needed a customer to remember a shade in the car park. The CSS Working Group needed browsers to agree.

None of them consulted a higher authority, because there is none. A color name is a small agreement that stuck.

Which also explains why the same color carries different names in different rooms. A mid-blue is 15-4020 to a printer, Cerulean to a fashion buyer, Blue Bell to a child, Bracing Blue to a decorator and #98B4D4 to a developer. All five are correct. They are answers to different questions.

What makes a color name work

Across all four systems the names that survive share a few properties, and they are worth knowing if you are choosing one yourself.

They point at something already shared. Sienna, Chestnut, Cerulean and Salmon all borrow a reference the listener can picture without being told. Names built from abstractions — Harmony, Essence, Vitality — test poorly because they give the eye nothing to hold.

They are specific rather than accurate. Elephant's Breath is not a measurement, and no one has checked. It works because it is oddly precise about a mood, and precision of that kind is more memorable than a correct description. Paint naming teams learned this decades ago: Warm Grey Number Four is accurate and forgettable.

They survive being said out loud. A name that a customer repeats to a friend does free work, which is why the industry favours short phrases with an unexpected second word. The awkward ones get abandoned quietly.

They do not overpromise. A shade named for a place it does not resemble annoys the person who bought it. The name has to still make sense once the color is on the wall, in the box, or on the screen.

For a personal registration the calculus shifts slightly, because the audience is one person rather than a market. A private reference beats a poetic one: the specific blue of a front door, a shade someone always wore, the green of a particular summer. It does not need to be legible to strangers. It needs to be unmistakable to the person receiving it.

Naming one yourself

Nothing in any of this is restricted. Naming a color requires no permission, no fee and no qualification — you can decide this afternoon that a particular blue is called something, and you will be exactly as entitled to that name as Pantone is to Cerulean.

What an informal name lacks is persistence. It exists in your head, or in a note that gets lost. There is no date attached to it, no fixed HEX value, and nothing that survives the phone it was written on.

That is the narrow thing a registry provides. The Official Color Registry fixes a color to an exact HEX value, attaches the name you choose along with a dedication and a date, issues a Registry ID and keeps the entry permanently, with a certificate to show for it. Each exact HEX value is recorded once.

It is worth being precise about what that is and is not. It creates no legal right of any kind, grants no trademark, and does not stop anyone using the color — we cover that in full in Can You Legally Own a Color?, and the limits are set out on our Standards page. We also hold the CSS named colors back from registration entirely, on the reasoning that nobody should be able to take "black" or "teal" out of circulation for a few dollars.

What it does offer is the thing rebeccapurple demonstrates better than any argument could: attaching a person to a color is a real and lasting way to remember them. That naming happened to land in a technical specification. Most of them will not. The gesture is the same either way.