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. What about a poster whose profits go towards charity?
    Like art supplies for blind orphans.

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  2. @Peter

    You are totally right. I keep getting my sex-linked alleles mixed up. They are usually on the X chromosome, not the Y. The reason color-blindness is less prevalent in XX individuals is that they have a small chance of being homozygous recessive. An individual with XXY chromosomes would have nearly the same chance of being colorblind as someone with XX. Is that right?
    So asking how many X chromosomes one has would have been asking the question Mr. Munroe intended to ask. I do believe he was on the right track though in his initial question. He got past, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

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  3. Vindicated. In the sixth grade, seventeen years ago, I was given the word fuchsia in the spelling bee and failed out.

    Fuck you, Scripps National Spelling Bee.

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  5. I studied psychology in university and read a lot of scientific reports, but none with the entertainment value you provide. More studies and surveys should be written up this way!! I actually read the whole thing through, which is more than I can say for a lot of those booooorrrrrrring papers in university!!!

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  7. after being in engineering I have a better appreciation for the actual color name, especially after dealing with mostly girls in my chemistry and biology classes, so I definitely think that I skewed the “salmon” color for guys…sorry.

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  10. Pingback: links for 2010-05-04 at DeStructUred Blog

  11. Not only are the color genes on the X chromosome there are two versions of the red/green receptor.
    In females one X chromosome is randomly inactivated (Lyonisation).
    Women with both versions have a mixture of cones with both versions and therefore expanded red colorspace perception compared to “normal”.
    Female carriers of color blindness genes also have mixtures of normal and dysfunctional cones. They have “normal” color perception on screening tests but can be shown to have impaired/altered color perception on highly discriminating tests.

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  16. Pingback: Transformer-Ivan » XKCD Color Survey
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  18. ::SNUGGLES:: I recently painted my bathroom three colors, and it makes me SO happy when someone realizes that two of the colors are in fact purple, even though one of them looks quite like a pale blue, it is in fact a very blue periwinkle, which is a purple.
    What I mean to say is, the results of this survey have pleased my personal gods.

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  19. I don’t care where you are from, colour is spelled c o l o u r, not c o l o r.
    Obviously this is/was not a realistic survey, because, in the real world, there are only three colours. They are: black; white and grey.
    BTW…nice jab on statistics (stupid math to fool stupid people).

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  21. Your suggestion to remove indigo from the Color Wheel but not orange hurts me. If you look at even your own chart it’s obvious that orange is a tiny spectrum between yellow and red.

    Check out this superior chart: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Eiwce13X738/S4qffA1GirI/AAAAAAAAIAk/4RaT6NG9Njo/s1600-h/Digital_YRMBCG_Wheel.Gurney.jpg

    This is Tobey Sanford’s color wheel, he has also scrapped indigo to make a magenta-blue-cyan transition. Look how nice and even it looks!

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  23. I am amused that you came up with the right spelling “fuchsia” even though the Google image clearly shows a different (wrong) spelling “fuschia.”

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  24. Did you get a painfully small sample size? I can’t imagine that some people picked some of those names more than once. Do multiple people really agree that a particular shade is “weird green,” that one shade of cobalt is “petrol” (Really? It’s not even blue!), or that a narrow band of green-brown can be named with various descriptors of baby feces?

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  26. Everybody always thinks they’re “skewing” the data. Guys, you’re not that special. There are a lot of people just like you. All you’re doing is introducing some variance.

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  28. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who felt like I was going crazy when I did that survey. After a while, I wanted to do more, but every colour looked the same, and I found I didn’t even know what “colour” was any more.
    And I agree with Corinne, this is written in a much more interesting way that most academic research papers are – which is a pity as I’m about to read a few of them…

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  29. I feel so special, having my comment about the one that isn’t really purple but is at the same time posted on the blog. I am humbled. Thank you, good sir.

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  31. LOL You still spelled “fuschia” incorrectly.

    “Fuchsia” is a species of plant.

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  33. Beautiful, just beautiful. And I’ll never forget how to spell “fushia”. fuck… “Fuchsia”

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  34. Melanie: “Fuchsia” is right. According to Wikipedia, it’s named after the plant. “Fuschia” is rejected by both Google’s and Firefox’s spellcheckers, which suggest “fuchsia” instead.

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  35. Pingback: Geeking Out About… » Karen’s Link of the Day: Color perception and names and a whole lot of data about it.

  36. I notice that the area for “Sky Blue” is tiny…how does that small peice of color compare to the actual color of the sky?

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  40. Thought about the women’s disproportionate color names: These look like names for lipstick or makeup of some kind. Especially the modifiers like “dusty.”

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  41. Oh hey, you used my answer for the not-quite-starry-night blue! …At least, I think that was mine. Answered something along those lines… Excellent survey, very interesting results, and I agree with the above comment– why not a poster where the proceeds go to charity?

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  42. I’m gonna have to take credit for some of the more interesting answers. I don’t remember for sure, but a few of them sound familiar, and even more are the type of thing I’d say after 50 or so questions and then getting bored.

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  43. The “assorted things people came up with while labeling colors” were hilarious, I wish I had thought to add a few of my own comments while taking survey. Silly me and my love of providing scientific data.

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  44. Pingback: Trust Tommy » Things I love Wednesday

  45. The fuchsia flower is named after a German guy named Fuchs. Fuchs means ‘fox.’ Which makes the spelling easier to remember.

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  50. I have to agree with Corinne. I read the whole thing and enjoyed it.
    Good work!

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