Why colours have weird names

Ask five different naming systems what to call #FA8072 and you get five different answers.

• Crayola calls it Salmon.
• X11 (the Unix colour standard) calls it Salmon, by coincidence, but at a different exact hex.
• Pantone calls it 16-1546 TPG, which is less a name than a barcode.
• HTML’s named colour list, which is essentially X11 with extras, says salmon is #FA8072 but lightsalmon is #FFA07A, and nobody is sure why.
• The British Admiralty colour chart, used for marking naval signal flags until the 1960s, did not include the colour at all, because ships did not need it.

This is not unusual. Every colour in the 24-bit sRGB gamut has somewhere between zero and fifty names depending on which systems you consult, which decade you consult them in, and which country you are in. The reasons are partly historical, partly commercial, and partly an accident of how language works around perception.

Here is what is going on.

The first problem: colour is a continuum, names are discrete

There are 16,777,216 distinct sRGB codes. There are, generously, a few thousand colour names in active use across all known naming systems combined.

So each name has to cover thousands of distinct colour codes. What counts as “salmon” is a fuzzy region of the sRGB space, not a single point. Two designers looking at two adjacent hex codes might both reasonably call them salmon, even though the codes are technically different.

Different naming systems draw the boundaries of that fuzzy region differently. Crayola draws one boundary around salmon because they have to fit it on a crayon label. Pantone draws a much narrower boundary because textile mills need precise colour-matching. HTML drew whatever boundary happened to be in the X11 config file in 1985, because the person maintaining the file that day found salmon in a book of heraldic names.

The historical systems

Named colours are much older than the screen. Each generation of colour-adjacent industries developed its own naming scheme, optimized for its particular needs.

Heraldry, roughly 1100s to present, gave us the oldest coherent colour vocabulary in English. Gules (red), azure (blue), vert (green), sable (black), argent (silver), or (gold). These were the “tinctures” permitted on medieval coats of arms, and the restricted vocabulary was the point: you could only use six colours, and you could only pair them in specified combinations, so heralds could quickly describe any coat of arms verbally. Heraldic colour names survive today in contexts like national flags and university crests.

The British Admiralty colour code, 1800s, still referenced in reduced form, standardized signal flag colours for naval communication. Precise blues, reds, and yellows, because ships needed to be able to read each other’s signals from a mile away in poor weather. This was functional colour naming under constraints.

Farbenlehre / Natural Color System, 1800s to present, German and Swedish colour systems that tried to organise colours by how they feel to the human eye. Introduced the idea that colours could be described by their psychological primary components: redness, yellowness, greenness, blueness, whiteness, blackness. These systems were influential in European design education and continue to shape how some European brands specify colour today.

Munsell colour system, 1905, an American attempt to give every colour a three-number address: hue, value (lightness), chroma (saturation). Munsell is still used in agriculture to grade soil colour, in archaeology to describe pottery, and by colorists in the film industry. It is a real system with precise sample chips.

Pantone Matching System, 1963, the commercial dominance story. Pantone, a US printing firm, realized that designers and printers were always arguing about colour and published a set of physical swatch books with numbered ink recipes. A designer picks “Pantone 185” on their swatch book; the printer mixes the Pantone 185 recipe; both parties see the same red. Pantone licensed this system to the textile, paint, and plastics industries throughout the 1970s-2000s, and today it is the default way fashion, packaging, and print specify a branded colour.

X11 colour names, 1985, a list of around 140 named colours shipped with the X Window System on Unix. Includes gems like peachpuff, mistyrose, papayawhip, and thistle. These names came from a 1985 compilation of colour names for heraldic and botanical illustration, hand-selected by Paul Ravelling at Tektronix. They were designed for a completely different purpose than web design, but they ended up becoming the HTML named colour list almost unchanged, because CSS in 1996 just imported the X11 list wholesale.

Crayola, crayon colours from 1903 to present, a marketing-driven naming system. Crayola’s naming decisions have historically been made by a small committee at Binney & Smith, with input from children’s focus groups. Some of the more creative names (“Atomic Tangerine,” “Laser Lemon,” “Razzmatazz”) were added in the 1990s to give parents something to read aloud.

None of these systems talk to each other. All of them are in active use.

The modern systems

The web added its own layer of naming, mostly by accident.

HTML/CSS named colours, 147 of them, inherited from X11 plus a handful of 2014 additions like rebeccapurple (added in memory of Rebecca Meyer, daughter of CSS co-creator Eric Meyer, who died at age six). These names are the ones most working developers know, red, cornflowerblue, blanchedalmond, rebeccapurple.

Material Design palette, Google’s 2014 colour system for Android and the web. Uses numbered scales (Red 500, Blue 700, Teal 50) instead of descriptive names. Each scale has 10 or 14 steps. Solves the problem of “what is a slightly darker version of this colour” by making every colour part of a pre-built ladder.

Tailwind colour palette, an opinionated expansion of the Material Design approach, with more hues and more steps. slate-900, emerald-400, fuchsia-50. Widely adopted since 2021 because it matches how design systems are actually used in modern front-end work: as scales, not as one-off names.

Figma and Adobe named colours, proprietary libraries for brand work. Each tool maintains its own naming conventions for common brand colours.

Farrow & Ball paint names, a British paint manufacturer known for naming their paints things like “Elephant’s Breath,” “Mouse’s Back,” and “Churlish Green.” These names are marketing devices; they describe a mood and a room type as much as a colour. A surprising number of interior designers use Farrow & Ball names as a kind of shorthand in client briefs.

Why the names are weird

So why is it all a mess? Three forces.

One, naming is cultural. A colour’s name reflects what the namers could compare it to. Cultures that had easy access to saffron called an orangey-yellow “saffron.” Cultures with many kinds of tea called the same colour “ceylon” or “assam.” The Kalahari San languages have dozens of names for what English lumps under “brown,” because they had to identify many kinds of earth. English has one word for blue; Russian has two (светлый and тёмный for light-blue and dark-blue), which research has shown helps Russian-speakers distinguish shades faster. Language shapes perception, perception shapes language, colour names sit at the intersection.

Two, naming is commercial. Pantone, Crayola, Farrow & Ball, and Sherwin-Williams all make money from having proprietary colour vocabularies that their customers internalize. A brand that standardises on “Pantone 186 C” is locked into paying Pantone royalties for the privilege. A painter who knows Farrow & Ball “Elephant’s Breath” by name is a painter who buys Farrow & Ball paint. Weird, memorable names are defensible intellectual property in a way that “light grey-pink” is not.

Three, naming is accidental. A lot of the colour names in circulation today were added to some reference document in 1985 by a specific person, and everybody since has just carried them forward. papayawhip is a colour you will see in HTML code on sites built in 2026 because a Unix developer in 1985 thought it would be funny. These accidents compound.

What to do about it

For design-system work, do not use the HTML named colours. They are semantically meaningless and inconsistent across systems. Stick to a numbered scale (Tailwind-style or Material-style) with hex or OKLCH as the authoritative value.

For brand-critical colours, pick a Pantone reference and document it. The Pantone ink recipe is authoritative. The screen approximation is advisory.

For documentation, it is fine to say “our blue” and “our dark grey”, these are internal shorthand. Just make sure there is always a canonical hex or OKLCH value behind the name.

And on Colour Love, when you adopt a colour, you can give it any name you like. #FF5733 can be your “Autumn Mood” or your “Vermilion 24” or your “Tuesday’s Warmth.” The system records the name you pick. That is the whole mechanism. It skips the Pantone committee, the Crayola focus group, and the X11 developer writing config files. It is just you, the hex code, and whatever word you want the colour to carry. That is the point. Every serious colour has been named by somebody. Now it is your turn.