Color Survey Results

Posted byRandall 1,287 Comments on Color Survey Results

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Orange, red? I don’t know what to believe anymore!
—Anonymous, Color Survey

I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU AKS ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS
—Anonymous, Color Survey

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey.  Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions.  If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

  • If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
  • “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
  • Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
  • Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
  • A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
  • Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze.  There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post.  But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

Sex

By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic (which I altered slightly to fit in this blog, click for original):

It was funny, but I realized I could test whether it was accurate (as far as chromosomal sex goes, anyway, which we asked about because it’s tied to colorblindness) [Note: For more on this distinction, see my follow-up post]. After the survey closed, I generated a version of the Doghouse Diaries comic with actual data, using the most frequent color name for the handful of colors in the survey closest to the ones in the comic:

Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise).  The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.

So I was feeling pretty good about equality.  Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors.  I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

  1. Dusty Teal
  2. Blush Pink
  3. Dusty Lavender
  4. Butter Yellow
  5. Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly.  Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe.  Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

  1. Penis
  2. Gay
  3. WTF
  4. Dunno
  5. Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”.  And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it.  This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

I weep for my gender.  But, on to:

RGB Values

Here are RGB values for the first 48 out of about a thousand colors whose RGB values (across the average monitor, shown on a white background) I was able to pin down with a fairly high degree of precision:

The full table of 954 colors is here, also available as a text file here (I have no opinion about whether it should be used to build a new X11 rgb.txt except that seems like the transition would be a huge headache.)

The RGB value for a name is based on the location in the RGB color space where there was the highest frequency of responses choosing that name.  This was tricky to calculate.  I tried simple geometric means (conceptually flawed), a brute force survey of all potential center points (too slow), and fitting kernel density functions (math is hard). In the end, I used the average of a bunch of runs of a stochastic hillclimbing algorithm.  For mostly boring notes on my data handling for this list, see the comments at the bottom of the xkcd.com/color/rgb/ page.

Spelling and Spam

Spelling was an issue for a lot of users:

Now, you may notice that the correct spelling is missing.  This is because I can’t spell it either, and when running the analysis, used Google’s suggestion feature as a spellchecker:

A friend pointed out that to spell it right, you can think of it as “fuck-sia” (“fuch-sia”).

Misspellings aside, a lot of people spammed the database, but there were some decent filters in place.  I dropped out people who gave too many answers which weren’t colors used by many other people.  I also looked at the variation in hue; if people gave the same answer repeatedly for colors of wildly varying hue, I threw out all their results.  This mainly caught people who typed the same thing over and over.  Some were obviously using scripts; based on the filter’s certainty, the #1 spammer in the database was someone who named 2,400 colors—all with the same racial slur.

Map

Here’s a map of color boundaries for a particular part of the RGB cube.  The data here comes from a portion of the survey (1.5 million results) which sampled only this region and showed the colors against both black and white backgrounds.

The data for this chart is here (3.6 MB text file with each RGB triplet named).  Despite some requests, I’m not planning to make a poster of any of this, since it seems wrong to take advantage of all this volunteer effort for a profit; I just wanted to see what the results looked like.  You’re welcome to print one up yourself (huge copy here), but keep in mind that print color spaces are different from monitor ones.

Basic Issues

Of course, there are basic issues with this color survey.  People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall noise and some biases to the data (although it all seemed to even out in the end).  Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space.  Fortunately, what I’m really interested in is what colors will look like on a typical monitors, so most of this data is across the sample of all non-colorblind users on all types of monitors (>90% LCD, roughly 6% CRT).

Color is a really fascinating topic, especially since we’re taught so many different and often contradictory ideas about rainbows, different primary colors, and frequencies of light. If you want to understand it better, you might try the neat introduction in Chapter 35 ofThe Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 1), read Charles Poynton’s Color FAQ, or just peruse links from the Wikipedia article on color.  For the purposes of this survey, we’re working inside the RGB space of the average monitor, so this data is useful for picking and naming screen colors. And really, if you’re reading this blog, odds are you probably—like me—spend more time looking at a monitor than at the outdoors anyway.

Miscellaneous

Lastly, here are some assorted things people came up with while labeling colors:

Thank you so much to relsqui for writing the survey frontend, and to everyone else who sacrificed their eyeballs for this project.  If you have ideas and want to analyze these results further, I’ve posted the raw data as an SQLite dump here (84 MB .tar.gz file). It’s been anonymized, with IPs, URLs, and emails removed.  I also have GeoIP information; if you’d like to do geocorrelation of some kind, I’ll be providing a version of the data with basic region-level lat/long information (limited to protect privacy) sometime in the next few days. Note: The ColorDB data is the main survey.  The SatOnly data is the supplementary survey covering only the RGB faces in the map, and was presented on a half-black half-white background.)

And, of course, if you do anything fun with this data, I’d love to see the results—let me know at xkcd@xkcd.com.

1,287 replies on “Color Survey Results”

  1. I have always suspected that the regular RGB colorspace was unevenly spaced, and your map kind of shows this.

    So the question is: if we took those “color countries” and rescaled their area so that they all roughly take up the same space, and removed any descriptions, would we get a very evenly looking map?

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  3. Pingback: How men and women label colors

  5. What were the most common male responses if the idiocy is filtered out as well as the spam? That is, what “real” colours did males tend to name?

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  7. At first I thought you had provided a color wheel and was wondering about the data lost in the bottom left corner… but then I realized the colors ran from red to red.

    (what is the difference between kelly green and kelley green?)

    Additional observation: in your map, RGB takes up so much more space than CMYK! I’m not sure how well this fits with color theory, but it seems that the red side of the map has less “red” and more other names, whereas the green side is mostly “green”, and same goes for blue.

    Would like: the top 3 faces to make my own cube net. Those of you out there with cubical rooms might want to try your painting skills (and probably think of new paint color mixing methods to stay within budget)

    Now let’s see if this comment system comes back up.

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  8. This is really cool. I’m an evolutionary psychologist who is interested in sex differences in verbal ability and creativity. I was wondering if perhaps you’d be interested in linking to some online surveys I’m doing. 222,000 people, even if you need to throw out 50% of the data is mind-blowing.

    Mmmm… data!

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  9. It’s easy to remember how to spell fuchsia if you remember that it’s actually the color of the flowers of a plant named after Leonhart Fuchs – like claytonia was named after John Clayton, and clarkia was named after William Clark.

    It’s not Fuchs’s fault that someone decided to name a color after his plant.

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  11. Damn it, man. I’m rather disappointed I didn’t get to participate in the survey. I also just did a research presentation for my psychology stats lab; if you had datasets, this would’ve made an awesome presentation (with your permission of course).

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  12. I secretly suspected that one of the purposes of this survey was to see if there was continuity of response. I think I answered about 30 or 40 and I am sure I saw the same color a few times. I have not time nor bandwidth to do it myself, but I was wondering if people who saw the same color multiple times had a good track record of accurately repeating their chosen color nomenclature.

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  13. Maybe it would help to know that the color Fuchsia is named for the plant Fuchsia, which was discovered by a guy named Plumier who named it after a botanist named Fuchs. Yeah, actually, I’m *sure* that will help.

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  14. Did you ask any of the respondents whether they consider themselves synesthetes? That might explain some of the non-random noise in the data. For some people these colors represent letters of the alphabet, and that might affect the names they prefer to use for them.

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  15. It was actually cool to see all of those statistics on something as simple as color names. And the fact that we can’t spell fuchsia as a society… I really liked the representation of the section of the RBG cube too, It just gave you an idea of what kinds of colors people think are the same.

    Heehee, my captcha’s ‘rave was’, as in ‘The color name rave was so awesome that I can never look at dusty blue the same again.’

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  17. Pingback: Color Survey Results « xkcd | Blogavert

  18. Color Terminology and Color Classification: Ancient Egyptian Color Terminology and Polychromy by John Baines
    # American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 282-297
    # Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association

    Check this article out – One of the more interesting lectures I took in one of my undergrad anthropology courses dealt with cross-cultural colour classification.

    It’s touched on very slightly in Macaulay’s The Social Art, pp 160-161

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  19. First, I can spell fuchsia because you forget the pokemon demographic who learned all their obscure colors from the names of the cities. Second amusing as it is to type my street address into the blank for mail, that apparently does not work. Third and finally, my pseudonym rocks

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  20. You could make a poster and donate 100% of the proceeds to Direct Relief or some other such noble cause.

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  22. Pingback: Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings » on-color jokes

  23. I must be an outlier, being both male, and liberal with descriptors when i took the test…

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  24. Pingback: Color perception among XKCD readers | timnhanh.us
  28. Pingback: How men and women label colors | EMDMA

  29. This is awesome! I love it! Hilarious and well-written. Nice graphic representations of data, also.

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  30. Fantastic! Now I know my night lost going through colour swatches was not in vain. 🙂

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  31. Come to think of it, you are probably the target or more SQL injection attacks than most banks and credit card agencies. You realize of course, that every program you ever write in the future must be bulletproof against SQL injections.

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  32. Great article! I teach color theory at an art school in Indianapolis, and I’m always trying to find new ways of integrating a RGB approach to color. Most fine-arts color theory classes are taught from a cmyk or ryb perspective, especially since you can get into color chords, primaries/secondaries/tertiaries etc, but I think there’s still more to be said with an RGB approach.
    Your article is now required reading in my class!

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  33. I’d like to see just the color blind results.
    I took the survey and I am color blind.

    Thanks,
    Curt

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  34. I found some of these to be quite funny, and cannot spell fuschia without spellcheck either. What was the random slur posted 2,400 times? Can only make it funnier.

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  35. Pingback: Color Names « Bryan Takes Pictures

  36. Perhaps I am being pedantic, but in your survey you asked about the genetic sex of participants—not gender.

    To this end, “I weep for my gender” is not a hypothesis that your data can support.

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  37. hmm i think i did this wrong. i thought we were supposed to submit a different name for every color, not simply name the blue looking ones blue and red looking ones red. my data probably got thrown out because I named 20 different shades of red ferrarri, cherry, tomato, heirloom tomato, candy apple red etc. so if you find my data you can resubmit it to the “not spammer data” thanks

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  38. Given the volunteer effort, have you considered making a poster, selling it, and donating the proceeds to a charity?

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  40. COOL! This project totally gave me a boner. Awesome. And now I know how to spell fuchsia. That stumped me while I entered names.

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  41. You should make the poster available for purchase with profits going to a good charity. Perhaps a colorblindness research facility for hilarity purposes. But I think other research is more pressing right now. Errr, yes, my two cents.

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  46. I would be very interested in seeing a comparison between colorblind people and “normal vision” people. As a colorblind participant, I would like to be involved somehow.

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  47. nice one.

    “By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic”

    there’s a “female 2 male color converter” made by a polish couple, have fun: http://fmcc.ania.cc/

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  48. In Language and Women’s Place Lakoff suggests that “this lexical disparity reflects a social inequity in the position of women.”

    Men tend to relegate to women things that are not of concern to them, or do not involve their egos. Among these are problems of fine color discrimination. We might rephrase this point by saying that since women are not expected to make decisions on important matters, such as what kind of job to hold, they are relegated the noncrucial decisions as a sop. Deciding whether to name a color “lavender” or “mauve” is one such sop.

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  49. About halfway through I gave up and started naming chemicals and solutions… can’t really find any other good way to name them, since that green looked EXACTLY like tetrachlorocuprate! Once a color came up that’s EXACTLY the color my aqueous waste beaker always is. Any other chem dorks know that color.

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  50. Excellent writeup!

    It would be interesting to see statistics regarding how long it took till someone gave up on naming colors, and maybe check that against gender and or country of origin.
    In the same vein, you can check at which point people started spewing garbage, and what were the colors that prompted it.

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