Color Name Finder

How it works

Naively comparing colors by RGB Euclidean distance produces bad matches, because RGB space isn't perceptually uniform — equal RGB distances don't correspond to equal perceived color differences, especially in greens, where the eye is far more sensitive to small changes than the raw numbers suggest. CIE76 Delta-E instead measures distance in Lab space, a color model specifically designed so that equal numeric distances correspond much more closely to equal perceived differences; the finder converts your input hex to Lab, computes the Euclidean distance to every one of the 1,094 named colors in ChromaWell's dataset in that Lab space, and ranks by the smallest distance. Because the search checks all 1,094 named colors rather than a smaller curated shortlist, the result set spans both the 148 formally standardized CSS/X11 names and the 946 informally crowd-sourced xkcd survey names — which means a top match is sometimes a more obscure xkcd name (like 'dusty teal' or 'faded orange') rather than a familiar CSS keyword, simply because the crowd-sourced set happens to have finer-grained coverage in that particular part of the color space.

Worked example

Searching #FF6B5B (a warm coral-red) returns nearest matches ranked by Delta-E: likely 'Tomato' (#FF6347, ΔE around 3-4, a very close perceptual match) ahead of 'Coral' (#FF7F50, a slightly larger ΔE) and 'Salmon' (#FA8072, larger still) — the ranking reflects genuine perceptual closeness, not just how similar the hex digits happen to look. A more ambiguous case makes the value of Lab-space ranking clearer: searching a muted sage green like #8FA88C returns a top match from the xkcd set rather than the CSS set, since the 148-color CSS palette has comparatively sparse coverage of desaturated mid-tone greens — a genuine illustration of why combining both datasets, rather than searching the CSS keywords alone, produces meaningfully closer nearest-name results for colors that don't happen to sit near one of the well-known named CSS swatches.

When to use this tool

Use this when you have a raw hex value (from a design file, a scraped stylesheet, or an extracted image color) and want to know what it's commonly called, or want to check it against a well-known reference color before shipping it as a named design-system token. It's also a useful sanity check when writing copy or documentation that refers to a color by name — confirming that what you're calling 'teal' in a spec document is actually closer to teal than to cyan or seafoam in measured perceptual terms avoids the kind of naming mismatch that causes confusion between a design spec and an engineer's implementation later. It's also the fastest way to browse this site's full 1,094-color dataset starting from a specific value rather than browsing by hue family.

Precision & accuracy

Delta-E distances are computed in Lab space using the CIE76 formula to two decimal places — a well-established, if not the newest, perceptual distance formula (CIE94 and CIEDE2000 refine it further for certain hue ranges, particularly blues, but CIE76 remains a solid, fast, widely-used baseline that's more than precise enough for finding the nearest named color from a fixed 1,094-entry dataset). It's worth knowing precisely what a given ΔE range means in practice: differences below about 1.0 are generally imperceptible to the human eye under normal viewing conditions, differences of 1-2 are detectable only on very close side-by-side inspection, 2-10 is a clearly noticeable but related difference, and above roughly 10 the two colors read as unrelated — which is why this tool's top match, even at a ΔE of 8 or 9, is still meaningfully closer than a randomly chosen name, even though it wouldn't look identical if placed directly beside your input color.

FAQ