Color Name Survey

Posted byRandall 369 Comments on Color Name Survey

I’d like your help for a color name survey!  The survey shows you colors, and you type a name (word or phrase) you might use for that color.  The names can be as broad or specific as you want.  The survey is here:

http://aram.xkcd.com/color/

My friend Finn (relsqui on #xkcd) wrote the frontend. I’m doing the analysis, though I won’t go too deeply into the details or purpose (to the extent that it has one) for now so as not to bias peoples’ answers.  Of course, RGB is a small and relative color space which varies depending on the device displaying it, so this survey has its limits, but it’s produced some cool data so far.

If any of  you want to help, you can fill out a few quick questions (don’t worry if you don’t know the answers—they’re highly optional and just help with calibration) and then come up with color names.  There’s no end to the survey; the more you answer, the better the data.  Thanks!

P.S. I’ve added a few much-requested prints and two new posters (Movie Narrative Charts and Gravity Wells) in the xkcd store.  The prints of Comic #150 (Grownups) are marked backordered right now while I replace a batch that was printed wrong, but they should be shipping again within a week.

369 replies on “Color Name Survey”

  1. I won’t mention my color names so as not to suggest them to others, but the survey just made me realize something odd about how I judge colors.

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  2. Do we make up the names, or do we describe it using the names of common colours? For example, if we see a reddish brown, do we type in Reddish Brown or do we type in a completely new name that we think up?

    (Assuming the latter- yes, it was I who put down every brownish colour as “Fecal Matter”)

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  4. I wonder if it is to see if you can identify the same color when viewed after different colors. does light green still look green after a whole bunch of salmons?
    my favourite one was the one I called my favourite

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  5. Ah, a perfect survey for a grapheme-color synaesthete! I’m sure to have fun with this.

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  6. Oh, it appears that I’ve misinterpreted what you said in the post. I thought you meant names of people, not the names of actual colors.

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  7. Interesting. I went through about 34 colours before it became painfully clear that I lacked the vocabulary to describe them. I found myself repeating the same names for slightly different colours and also bringing in imagery that the colour brought to mind (“corn tassel” or “sky blue”).

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  13. I got addicted to the color survey- I answered 30 until I started getting a lot of repeats. I’m both a design and optics nerd so I ended up naming some of the obscure ones like “midtone desaturated cerise”… yeah I know how to distinguish between cerise, magenta and red, even if it’s darkened and desaturated XD …I find myself correcting people far too often when they name a color.

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  15. I too got a little addicted to answering these. Got to 45 when I told myself I have to stop.

    Is it just me, or did anyone else put “Oriental Avenue” with one of those colors? >.>

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  17. I wonder how long untill someone starts submitting the RGB codes for the colours…

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  18. I downloaded the 9MB user manual for my monitor and was unable to find the color temperature.

    Also I assume answers like #00FF00 are not what you are looking for?

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  19. i read sometime back that staring at a color for more than 30secs will affect the next color you see. hope this effect is also considered in this survey. 🙂

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  20. But when will The Funniest (and sibling sites) be fixed, Randall? WHAT ABOUT THEM?

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  21. I think the (or a) purpose of this isn’t necessarily to see what people call different colors; it’s more to see how reliably people call the same shade the same name on repeated viewings. I’m guessing you’re expecting the sequence of shades viewed to have an observable effect on what people call the shades?

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  22. Hi,

    I’ve just answered your survey and I wondered why not adding something like a cloud tag for answering (or something like a check/radio button list of choice).
    I think one limitation to your survey is the vocabulary of participant, I’m myself not an english native so it’s harder to answer as I would in my native language…

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  25. Anyone else got the Ubuntu colours repeatedly? I couldn’t miss tagging them appropriately..

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  26. I was gonna say the same thing as Nieske but without the scientific reference. I’m happily typing away at the survey – it’s really quite addictive and I loved the background information screen, why don’t they make surveys friendly like that? – although I’d be able to give much more nuanced answers in my native Swedish.

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  27. “Do you have a Y chromosome? If unsure, select “Yes” if you are physically male and “No” if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness. ”

    Please tell the person who wrote this that this is fucking offensive and unnecessary. Everyone (even ‘crazy’ trans people) understands what “do you have a Y chromosome” means. I presume I am XX though I have never been tested so I can’t be 100% sure. But I am still “physically male” because I am male. And SRS (i mean, really?) has nothing to do with anything and should never come up on a survey like this.

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  29. Gah! The whole survey stops working if you accidentally hit the back button. (And since my mouse is configured for the side button to go back, it’s easy to do by accident.) You’re left in a world of “this web page has expired”.

    I hate web UI.

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  30. Isn’t Grownups comic 150?
    Just saying… not to be rude…

    I did about 49 till I realized how obvious it was that I was just procrastinating in a very lame way… and then I cried in a corner for a while.

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  31. I’m also wondering what the first commenter asked. This survey reminded me a little of a few sites I used to visit, one being Colorspeak (http://bulltown.com/colorspeak/1/) and the other being Colourlovers (http://www.colourlovers.com/) In the former site, people usually describe in several words what a color means to them, like “a hazy storm cloud on a rainy day” or even longer descriptions. On the latter site, people more often use shorter, label-like terms, such as “haunted milk” and the like. I’m wondering which is more appopriate; I presume the latter, but I’d like to make sure.

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  35. Dude, some of those aren’t colors. Some of those hurt my eyes…and my stomach.

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  37. I’m having problems with it not liking things, which is probably just the school computers being terrible at everything they were designed to do.

    Array ( [monitor] => LCD [temperature] => temperature-dk [gamma] => gamma-dk [colorblind] => cblind-dk [ychromosome] => ychrom-yes [colorindex] => 5 )

    Will try later when I get home.

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  40. I only got to name one colour, then the site died 😦

    I wonder what kind of monitor would you need to be able to see Octarine?

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  42. Is this test supposed to get harder? I was all “Green. BAM! Light Brown. BAM! Black. BAM! … magenta? …. … I already used Light Brown, didn’t I? Is aqua a colour?”

    Thanks for rebooting all my old Pop-Quiz-in-my-underwear-didn’t-study-and-then-they-let-the-bulls-out nightmares.

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  43. I’m not sure if this is meant to be an imagination survey (how inventive can you be naming colours), a vocabulary survey (how many colour-words do you know) or a colour vision survey (can you tell the difference between these similar colours). I tried to answer all the questions with a simple format, which meant I ran out of adjectives for the degrees of gradation. I started resorting to long descriptions like “dark green, but slightly lighter than the other colour I called dark green”.

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    1. It’s just trying to find what color words mean in practice. With possibly millions of answers I’m not going to be decoding each long sentence-sized description by hand, so those will pretty much be ignored. But as for what names to use, think crayon colors — both the simple ones and the creative names in the large boxes.

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  45. My monitor only lists “Warm”, “Cool” and “User”. I guess that would put me in “I don’t know” but then I feel like I’m being patronized by the instructions on the page.

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  46. quite amusing that this went live at the same time as the doghouse “color wheel” comic. I guess I have my cheatsheet now 🙂

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  48. im interested/excited/curious to see this data and/or what purpose it will serve. I passed it on to my friend who used to have fun playing a game that involved guessing pantone colors.

    I think I would name the colors differently if they were presented differently (black background or full screen, etc.).

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  49. First:

    I loved the background information screen, why don’t they make surveys friendly like that?

    Later:

    […]I feel like I’m being patronized by the instructions on the page.

    Aw, man.

    Anyway, few people know the color temperature or gamma, and I didn’t want them to turn back from the survey because they got sidetracked trying to find it or didn’t want to continue without filling it in.

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  50. Very interesting. Looking forward to (hopefully) seeing some data. I felt like I was naming crayons.

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