🔤Colour Name Finder

About this tool

Type or paste a hex code, use the colour picker, or press Random. You'll see the closest CSS colour name with how close it is, a plain-English description such as "muted azure", the colour's HEX, RGB, HSL and OKLCH values, and the six nearest named colours. Click one to copy its name.

How colours get their names

Browsers understand 148 named colours, the CSS colour keywords (141 once the gray and grey spellings are merged). They run from aliceblue and antiquewhite to whitesmoke and yellowgreen, and include classics like tomato, teal, rebeccapurple and cornflowerblue. Any of these can be used in CSS instead of a hex code, and they're handy shorthand for describing a colour. To find the nearest name, this tool converts your colour and every named colour into OKLab, a colour space designed so that the same numeric distance looks like the same amount of difference to the human eye. It then picks the closest. That avoids the odd results you get from comparing raw RGB numbers, where a dark blue and a dark green can come out as "close". The distance is shown as ΔE: under about 2 is hard to tell apart side by side, and over 7 is clearly a different colour. For example, #3A7CA5 is closest to steelblue. The description is built from the colour's lightness, chroma (how vivid it is) and hue angle. Uses include naming design tokens and brand colours, describing a colour in alt text or to someone who can't see it, picking a CSS keyword for a quick prototype, and settling arguments about whether something is teal or turquoise. Honest limits: colours far from any named colour only get an approximate name, and colour vocabulary differs between languages, cultures and brands. The colour converter, the contrast checker and the image colour picker are related, and Hex colour codes, explained explains hex codes.

Frequently asked questions