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”

  2. how many till the end? i got to 102. i always wonder about naming clours so i thought it was fun. i also had tv on in the foreground so i was only half-concentrating and then i got to a point where i thought, ‘it must finish soon…’ programme ended. i stopped.

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  3. I totally got sidetracked trying to find out my monitor’s colour temperature and gamma despite the “I don’t know” options.

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  4. I don’t know the scope of the study, but it might be good to ask the type of color-blindness of a colorblind participant. I know that I’m deuteranomaly colorblind (green receptors damaged), which is the most common type, but there are a few other varieties!

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  5. Hey i was thinking of some data processing doing RGB vs. certain letter densities in the input. i only thought of this because it reminded me of that old “BoBo” and “KeKe” experiment. basically, you draw a scribbly line and then a straight line with hard corners. then you ask the experimentee to name each line with either of the two names, and people seem to always name the scribbles BoBo and the straightened line KeKe.

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  6. I’m German. It’s difficult for me to name the colors, because English isn’t my native language. I ended up looking in an dictionary for the English word for bordeaux (a dark red) which is actually a region in France, famous for its wine. The dictionary says that bordeaux means maroon in English. But maroon also means chestnut (In German: Kastanien) which is also used as an color in German, but it describes a brownish-red and not a wine-like dark red.

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  8. I’d like to see a skip option. Some color spaces I might be more familiar with than others.

    Maybe a wiki version would be cool too.

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  9. Ooooh, crayon colors! Man, do I have fond memories of that jumbo-sized Crayola box with the built-in sharpener I had as a kid 🙂

    Technically my native language is Filipino but I’m more fluent in English. Still went ahead and answered “Tagalog” for that part of the survey though.

    And I gotta say, figuring out the differences between fuchsia and magenta puts some strain on your eyes after a while.

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  12. I feel bad now having read the comments on it, but I was answering in CIELab notation for a while.. listing L*, a* and b* values after screen-shotting and copy pasting into Photoshop. Munsell was my 2nd choice but.. it didn’t pan out so well since my color book is still at school. (Photographic Technology major @ RIT here.)

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  13. I’m teaching a statistics class and I think this would be an awesome data set to work with. Is there any possibility you’ll release the raw data at some point?

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  14. The question about the Y-chromosome is actually about a study to determine if men can really only see a dozen colors.

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  15. I wish there was a way to look at my personal color-name history. This is some of the most fun writing I have done in a long time.

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  17. I’m saying this before taking the test in order to not bias my response, but please be sure to randomize the order of colors, as studies have shown that the perception of color can be altered by seeing other colors before it (seeing blue immediately prior makes something else look less blue, etc)

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  18. Well, I have too much homework to get too involved in why you’re doing this color survey. I’m not sure I even finished the survey.

    However, I think it would be interesting to do something with xkcd avatars.

    I mean, my xkcd avatar is a shepherdess with a pony tail… I’m distinguished by the shepherd’s crook. Of course, my crook is unusual… but you can tell it’s me because I always carry a crook and I have a pony tail. In fact, if you had a registry of xkcd avatars, I’d like to register mine so it’s my I.D.

    In fact, if I ever get out of school and have a life, I’d like to do the xkcd geohashes and I’d leave my avatar all over the place.

    So, sometimes the shepherdess ends up as an element in a set during Logic & Proof class or as a generator in a Cayley table. She’s already showing up in certain places. Stranger things have happened…

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  19. Man this is awesome. Great for some english color words training.
    Also i smell a new poster size comic, with lots of colors on it.

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  20. The survey form at the beginning doesn’t specify whether you want the monitor’s actual gamma (e.g. 2.2 or 1.8) or the gamma correction value to apply to the colors to reach my target gamma (which would be much lower.) I’m just hoping I’m not putting “light” in front of a bunch of colors that don’t deserve it. 😛

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  21. It would have great if the survey instructions indicated that there was not end. I was on number 30 by the time I realized it might be cyclical.

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  22. I second Mitch’s comment; after 60+, I assumed there was no end. And being color blind, I wasn’t even sure if I had seen some already or not… That being said, taking this color-blind was oddly entertaining!

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  23. This was definitely an interesting exercise; I probably learned more about my own colour preference than the test will. It turns out I like pale shades of blue, I’m surprisingly harsh to greens, and moderate to very sympathetic for pinks and purples — who knew!

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  25. I realised as I went through this test that I was using a lot of the names from the Derwent pencil set. Apparently I am subconsciously influenced by my art materials.

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  26. Am I the only one that HATED this survey? I got about 20 questiosn in and was getting increasingly frustrated at my lack of vocabulary for describing colors. Some of the colors were obviously different but I didn’t have the words to clearly describe what they were.

    Clearly not the actual survey that I’m complaining about, but the deficiency it did a very good job of highlighting.

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  27. I was doing this while my girlfriend was looking over my shoulder. I had to stop because she kept laughing every now and again after I submitted an answer. I’m colourblind, and had to stare at some for ages before making what was essentially a guess :/

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  29. @Ben
    I also read both xkcd and Doghouse Diaries obsessively so when I saw this blog post the same thing came to mind regarding DHD’s latest strip.

    Randall, –lately I’ve been thinking DHD and xkcd should collaborate for a week of interrelated comics. The internet would have a nerdgasm. A geek can dream, right?

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  30. This is totally a psych survey, isn’t it? “how many people will endlessly name colors because I asked them to…” ;^)

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  32. ummm – why, if I delete ‘color’ from the URL, does it come up with ‘Brothering corkscrewing reign’?

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  33. Pingback: March 2, 2010 – Links | MarcJStuff

  34. as a linguistics major, this is pretty interesting. some cultures have the same words for what we might describe as different colors in western society. the three colors found in every language though consist of black, white, and red. what we might call beige, red, and brown would be a single color listed as a earth tone.

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  35. I named 74 colours, then realised I couldn’t leave it at 74, so took it up to 100. I must admit my descriptions became a lot lazier for the last few… I started out all “Wait, I’m getting confused. Is that puce? I’ve used puce. Did I really mean magenta last time?” and then towards the end it was “That’s a pink. That’s also a pink. Hmm… more of a purple.”

    I also found that staring at a square of ever-changing colours can have a really weird effect on your eyes.

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  36. Hmmmm… wouldn’t there be a sample bias by people who supply a lot, or only a few answers. Do you have some way of tracking the number of answers per session?

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  37. Can you put the submit button to the right of the text field? The auto-completion overlaps the button.

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  39. Well, it was between this survey and reading my history textbook, so I answered 300. I consider it time well spent.

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  42. I called one of the shades of purple “reverse transcriptase” because that’s the color it is in my Biology book. Then I realized that I was completely missing the point of the survey 🙂

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  43. I guess you’ll have a lot of fun reading my answer since I am color blind and french. I gave something like 10 ‘blue’ answers but the colors were a bit different. I just don’t have name for those. I am not even talking about the green (or is it gray) answers.

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  44. My Theory: This is actually an experiment to find out how long it takes for the average person to go from being serious to typing in silly answers.

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  46. i like to speculate that the commentator’s speculations are done merely to build up anticipation for the respective commentators , instead of really being an expression of their wonder. i fake it so real, i am beyond fake; that sort of thing. I mean– really, how many graphic design snobs racked their brains recalling the names of $20 tubes of 6oz. paint that they never used anyway for fear of marking up the gouache of the canvas.
    and how many people will actually get mildly incensed at that comment because they’ve actually felt that before? it’s okay, hun, how do you think i know about it.

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  47. “under ‘Are you color blind’, you forgot the ‘My wife thinks so’ option”

    There actually did used to be a note about this! “If you’ve been called colorblind but not tested, please select no.” 😛 It got taken out because that first page was getting cluttered and we were trying to keep it simple and friendly-looking.

    “‘It would have great if the survey instructions indicated that there was not end.”

    From the first page of the survey: “The survey doesn’t have an explicit end. You can continue for as long as you’d like …”
    From the blog post: “There’s no end to the survey; the more you answer, the better the data.”
    I’m concerned that people keep saying they didn’t realize it didn’t have an end. I’m a firm believer that if the users and the UI designer disagree about what’s obvious, the designer is wrong, but I honestly do not know how we could have made this clearer.

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  48. My university has a Polymer and Color Chemistry major, there’s one class where you do exactly this all day.

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  49. >It would have great if the survey instructions indicated that there was not end.

    They do actually.

    I’ve noticed that other survey listing “male” and “female” as kinds of retinas. Is there really a physical difference? I always assumed it was all “in the software”…

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  50. I’d like there was a question on sexual orientation, to get some data on whether gay men *really* are more sensitive to colors or not. (My theory is that they are not; rather, straight males seem to have a kind of reverse pride in purposely not knowing the difference between salmon and peach).

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