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:
- Dusty Teal
- Blush Pink
- Dusty Lavender
- Butter Yellow
- 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:
- Penis
- Gay
- WTF
- Dunno
- 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.
xkcd 
Congratulations, you have passed Color! You may now go outside and play.
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I would be very interested to see how one of your reader’s found the exact color of “velociraptor cloaca” I was going to paint my kitchen.
I’m going to ask for it by name, at the Home Depot.
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To defend the fuchsia-misspellers, even Adobe is doing it wrong, specifying “fushia” as visited link color in HTML pages that you export from Adobe Acrobat Professional (don’t ask).
Thanks for the great results. I had a great time.
a graphic designer
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…we need more data to play with, like this. WIN!
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This was pretty slick. Glad to see I’m not the only one who felt like I was going insane. Your analysis is a pretty funny read as well.
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Looking at the colors contrasted with each other, I want to redo the test and name them after jellybellies! Either that or just eat a bag of jellybellies… *scurries to the store*
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This proved beyond a doubt that which I always suspected: that men see fewer color variants than women; or that women are responsible for the names colors receive.
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Shit, I have a feeling that “blue with a hint of your mother” is one of mine.
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I love the way you do science. Not only thorough, interesting, and important but also amusing and completely open (including publishing both the questionnaire and the raw data). The respect I hold for you has, though I thought this impossible, gone up another notch.
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Linguists always love to talk about the number of words a language has for color. As it seems, English has a ton; but of course I doubt each English speaker has an active command of as many as exist (and rather, we do passively recognize words for many colors).
What I’m curious about from your data is whether it’s possible to tell how many colors individual users have active command of themselves, and what the average number is for all these speakers. If you could, it’d be awesome to get an email (if even brief) about this. 🙂
Awesome data. Also, the recaptcha for this comment is “hats to”, so with that in mind, hats off to you!
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Wow, as a colorblind user, I’m surprised that other colorblind users actually typed “fuck this” and rage quit.
I just tried to name the greens…
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Interesting survey, and I loved some of the miscellaneous comments!
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I’d be interested in what color tipped people over the edge. From the Miscellaneous section, greener colors may have been the final straw. I wonder if that’s true, and if there’s a particular color that does poll higher, why that would be?
My wife and I have long argued over whether particular towels are green or yellow. I’d planned on putting a survey on my personal website to gauge readers opinion on where yellow turns to green. Now you’ve done my work for me. Right now I’m off to find the towels and put them through the scanner.
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I’ve found that it helps me to remember how to spell fuchsia if I bear in mind that it’s named after the plant, which is in turn named after Leonhart Fuchs (1501 – 1566), one of the three founding fathers of botany.
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Taking that survey was alot of fun (at least for me personally, it seems everyone else had a frustrating time, ecspecially with greens -_-.) I really hope you do another survey in the near-ish future, although I realize the amount of work you put in to this, so I completely understand if your hesitate to put yourself through this whole process again with a new survey =b.
Take care, and I absolutely love your comics your amazing =b.
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Okay, now my eyes hurt… but great work 🙂
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Salmon? You can tell that the males on the survey have been playing too much of the original Halo’s multi-player…
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You have to make a poster! The people who provided the input values were all volunteers, and one of the best ways to repay their work is to make it more famous. Plus you are the originator of the idea, the implementer, and the guy who did all the work to assemble the results – you deserve some remuneration for improving the world in this way! Or, ignore the capitalistic aspects and just realize that creating a poster will actually add value to the world, so you should do it.
I’ll buy one, certainly 🙂
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“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;”
Why is it wrong? If the data is released freely for anyone to use then you’d be just like any other person who could make a poster. The “payment” for the volunteer work is the data dump that we all can enjoy.
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Is this alive?
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It never occurred to me to submit penis as a colour name. I must not be a real boy 😦
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I have a few comments, which you might already have heard or know about. If that’s the case, well, then nevermind.
First of all it’s quite interesting, that I somewhat disagree with the chart that shows the most common color names over the three fully-saturated faces of the rgb cube. In my opinion, green covers a smaller area and turquoise (which might be teal, I’m not a native English speaker) should cover some of the green. I have some other issues, but instead of yapping about this, I have a point.
As you also say, what names we put on colors very much depend on what we have learned. Analogously, other cultures have other understandings of color. Let me give a few examples.
In older Danish (about viking age and mideaval period) gold was conceived as a nuance of red. It was literally called “the red gold”.
In some sagas from the viking age, some dark skinned people (who might have been African, dark skinned Southeuropean or something) were called “blue men” (“blámenn”). Apparently they conceived black as a nuance of blue.
There is or was a group of people somewhere (sorry, I have forgotten totally) who conceived green as a nuance of blue.
One thing is that we call colors different names, and some people have more names than others. I’m the guy on the comic from Doghouse Diaries, and my wife is the girl. Another and imo more interesting thing is, that we sometimes conceive colors quite differently. I mean, how can people conceive black as a blue color? I don’t get it. But they probably wouldn’t understand why I see the color differently.
Colors can actually be a good subject for discussion. Sometimes I strongly disagree with my wife about a certain color’s name.
Props to your comic, I love it.
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My favourite colour is dubstep
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I’d like to see the GeoIP version just because I want to check if I wrote “gosh, thats blue.”
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I found the gender question soooo problematic that I quit the survey after thinking about it for a few minutes. IIRC, it acknowledged that people might not fit the gender binary (yay!), but then said, “select your chromosomal sex” – which, hey, doesn’t always conform to the binary!!!! And then seemed to intend to draw conclusions about color naming (which totally has to be about as socially influenced a practice as I can think of) and gender, based on chromosomal sex??? Was so confused.
OTOH, I’m amused that the naming differences were not that big by gender, based on the people who were okay identifying within the stated terms. Wonder if the same results would come through from the readership of other sites…
Also, I LOVE the miscellaneous results. Thank you for pulling them out and sharing them!
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This was awesome and fun to participate, however there’s one sad point, and that I will not be able to buy a poster of any of this, because I think you are right, if you eventually sale a poster someone would say that you are taking advantage(totally not real) of your readers… and I would really really really love a poster that showed the RGB cube, some of the funniest answers and geo data.
on the geo data part, I think is truly relevant, since we name things different from one place to another , example: puma-mountain lion-cougar.
Many thanks from me to you for the fun time I had doing your survey, reading the results, and waiting for the next one!! (hopefully with less colors and more braaaains!!!)
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Perhaps you could let Breadpig sell a poster of the rgb cube? I wouldn’t be able to figure out the colorspace printing stuff. I know it won’t be accurate printed, but it could get close enough, right?
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Here’s a new X11 rgb.txt based on your data:
http://pastebin.com/FkpRkX3t
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I can’t trust any of the data you provided here. You’re clearly insane.
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In Language and Women’s Place Lakoff suggests that “this lexical disparity reflects a social inequity in the position of women.”
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Real story: Back when Southwest airlines used to handout plastic boarding cards, my wife and I were waiting to board our flight when over the intercom we heard, “Would all passengers with mauve boarding cards please board flight 143 for Phoenix.”
I turned to my wife and said, “There’s a flight that’s gonna be half full, ’cause there ain’t a guy in this terminal that knows what color mauve is!”
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Here’s a new X11 rgb.txt based on your data:
http://pastebin.com/0dhY6Xc0
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Wept with amusement, tinged with sadness.
This is an awful lot of effort to go to just to work out how best to colorise XKCD strips, which we all know is what you are really up to.
As long as it has moar baige I’m sure it will be fine.
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As a color blind individual I’m very interested in hearing what conclusions you can come up with about us using this data. Any plans for further analysis?
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This is wonderful work : ) Thank you very much for doing this.
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