About Color Name Finder
A free tool for one everyday question: what is this color called? Pick it, photograph it or type its code, and get a name you can trust, together with how close that name really is.
Who we are
We are two people, Nadya Yashchuk and Ivan Lukichev, and we do everything ourselves: design, code and texts.
Nadya is a software developer and the publisher: the site is officially published by her sole proprietorship registered in Austria, with the formal details in the Impressum. Ivan builds the web side: the color engine, the tools and the color pages. He makes web tools, mobile apps and games; more of his work is at lukichev.biz and on LinkedIn.
How the matching works
Every color is converted to OKLab, a perceptual color space published by Björn Ottosson in 2020, in which the straight-line distance between two colors follows how different they look. The finder compares your color with every named color and returns the nearest. The similarity score is that distance turned into a percentage: 100% means identical, and colors more than 0.25 apart in OKLab, which look clearly different, score 0%.
We use the same distance for the labels. Exact match requires identical codes. Virtually identical means a distance under 0.01, below what most people can see side by side. Very close is under 0.03, close is under 0.06; anything further is shown as the nearest name, not as a match.
All calculations run in your browser. The tools need no server, and images you open are never uploaded.
Data sources and licenses
- CSS named colors — the 148 color keywords of the CSS Color Module Level 4 specification (W3C). Shown as "CSS".
- xkcd Color Survey — the 949 most common color names from the color survey by Randall Munroe (2010), released under CC0. Shown as "xkcd". We leave out a handful of crude names and names that are trademarks.
- Color Names — a list of more than 30,000 color names by David Aerne and contributors, version 14.55, released under the MIT License (Copyright © 2017 David Aerne). Shown as "Color Names".
Color pages also use short descriptions written by us, and color combinations and tints computed by our own code. Brand and paint-maker color systems are not included: their names and codes belong to their owners, so please check those with the maker.
What we are honest about
Names are conventions, not measurements. The same word can mean different colors in different lists, and a screen shows the same code differently depending on its settings. For print, paint and fabric, use a physical sample or the manufacturer's code. If you find a name that looks wrong, tell us.
Our other projects
We also make HTTP Tools, quick utilities for web developers, HowLoud, a free online sound meter, and Headphone Check, an online headphone test.
Say hello
Found a bug or a strange name, or want a feature? Write to contact@nadzeyayashchuk.com. We read everything.