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 had a blast taking part in your survey, and it’s great to see the results. It got easier when you added in the black/white background to help with contrast. I wonder how the results would differ if you had access to people who DON’T spend a lot of time in front of computers …

    (Fuchsia named for German chemist Fuchs – as a biologist and fanatical speller, I’ve always remembered this for some reason)

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  2. Thanks for such an illuminating study! On the point of flowery color names that women came up with, you might enjoy the flip side: women’s cosmetic firms have been coming up with edgy names to counter the more feminine descriptors for color. Some of the most egregious ones (Pearl Harbor is one of the tame names) can be found in this article in today’s Salon http://bit.ly/ae6Bhh

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  3. I think this show conclusively that we men stop mentally aging at seven and just pretend from then on as stated by this very web comic.

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  4. How many people did what I did and kept trying to name things with two colors? I wanted to be accurate, so “blue-green” or “yellow-green” it was!

    (Maybe I’ll have to look at the raw data…)

    Some of those colors were truly horrible, btw: that one that was gray but with a tinge of two colors… WTF do you call that?

    Maybe someone could figure out which sections had people give the least clear names.

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  5. Pingback: xkcd and color – GNUconsulting

  6. hehe I had fun doing this survey. Though I must admit I think after about 25 greens I just started writing “green…again” lol 😀

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  9. I have to say that after so many varying shades, I just started describing the closest thing to the color and its name. I am terribly proud that I got on the Miscellaneous for ‘Shark Infested Water Blue.’

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  11. Blast your conscience! What do we have to do to give you permission to produce a poster? To clarify, this is what you’d be being paid for:
    a) hosting and organising the survey
    b) figuring out the best match between screen and print colours
    c) organising the poster
    d) the costs of printing and despatch
    Creating the availability of a poster would also be part payback for the people who spent time naming colours. That is, had I been aware of the survey when it was open, and participated thereof, I would have done so on the understanding that I would be able to buy a wallchart afterwards, and would have sent you a message to this effect if I thought it wasn’t obvious.

    Take a vote if it would put you at ease. You could always print data submitted by thousands of anonymous volunteers at the bottom. Of course, I’ll do it myself if you won’t, but I thought I’d try persuading you first a) out of courtesy and b) because I’m lazy and haven’t got time to organise it right now. And figuring out the best match between screen and print would be a real headache.

    I’ve always wanted to have a wallchart of obscure colour names for reference. And having some XKCD-isms in it, or colours called ‘green again’ for example, would top it off. If you are persuaded, my request would be: preferably first convert all submissions to the same colour space. That is, where people have specified different monitor types / colour temperatures / gamma values, try to convert their colours to the equivalent values in the most common monitor settings. Then find the most common 954 colours again. Either mixed in with, or after the 954 most common colours, also include on the poster anything funny or notable, e.g. velociraptor cloaca and ‘; DROP TABLE ‘colors’;, especially if it is submitted more than once for similar colours. Nothing wrong with including entertainment and reference on the same poster, is there?

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

    Not true.. ‘fuschia’, not ‘fuchsia’. Look at the image above the quote..

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  15. Coming from the UK, I hadn’t bumped into “ROY G. BIV” before now. We use “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” but I like “Virgins in Bed, Get Your Organs Ready”.

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  16. Cool survey…. and very fascinating.

    🙂

    PS: On an ironic note, the Captcha for my comment about your colour results survey was rainbow dipper… how awesome was that?! What are the odds (actually don’t worry about the odds!)

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  18. This is sweet! I did a project like this my junior year of college for my linguistics BA. I compared use of color terms in English with native English speakers, non-native English speakers whose first language was Spanish, and non-native English speakers whose first language was Korean.

    It’s actually a pretty well documented fact about languages: of course, they don’t all have the same variety of color terms, but if a language only has two color terms, they basically correspond to black and white. If they have three, you add red. After that, it is blue or green, and then green or blue, respectively, followed by yellow. It is actually pretty spooky how regular this is. Check out Eleanor Rosch, who is mostly known for prototype theory in linguistics but also did some pioneering work in color terms back in the day.

    Also, my captcha is “cockades is”. It makes me wonder, what IS a cockade??

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  19. I suppose it’s so difficult to spell fuchia because although Fuchsia came into being from the Latinisation of a German surname, and hence would have the hard sound of ‘fuk-sia’, that we have adopted a vulgar (meant as common, not nasty) French pronunciation of it via Charles Plumier’s creation of the word (he was a Frenchman).

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  20. Doghouse Diaries seems to have lifted their color names from the Apple Crayon Picker…

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  21. I nearly went crazy doing the survey because I kept thinking it would end soon and I’d convince myself to do “just one more color” (I didn’t realize it was endless, clearly.) I’m still glad I did it–the results are really interesting (and humorous) I think you sometimes see the worst in people after they spent hours identifying colors. 🙂 Will there be another survey?

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  25. Haha I just got the actual Hexadecimal RGB color from page source and wrote it in as the color every time.

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  26. In reference to your question about the y chromosome in the survey, don’t you think it would have been better to ask people if they knew how many x chromosomes they had? Sure, not everyone knows this fact about themselves, but that is the more relevant question when it comes to the genetic component of colorblindness, right?

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  27. Fuchs was a botanist, not a chemist. There is nothing better than to remind bored and troublesome undergrads on how to pronouce the genus with a Germanic emphasis. FOOKSIA!

    And while I missed participating in this survey, I did a PhD on fruit colour and had the same issues. WTF do you call a plant colour? When your stingy supervisor has a special instrument which you were denied? A special little portable spectroscope thingy that sat in their drawer all teh time you were struggling around windswept hillsides guessing the fkin’ colour of fkin’ ripening fruit?

    The prestigious Royal Horticultural Society has the prestigious and expensive RHS colour charts. You match the fruit or flower colour under sunlight (or equivalent) and then use a code. It takes the guessing out of naming colours. This code can be converted to a CIE LAB value using another chart – but the little special spectroscope thingy does it better.

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  29. I came here from the Flowing Data post about this survey, and I’m not going to read all 300+ comments to see if this has already been mentioned, so: Many years ago, I read a paper in a linguistics or anthropology journal about color names in different cultures and languages. Certain color distinctions were first to appear (e.g. every language that named colors had “red” and “blue”, or something like that), and certain additional colors would be added in a fairly predictable pattern. Fascinating. I should track it down again…

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  30. so maybe male and females both on the whole use simple color names, but I’ve got a feeling that the percentage of males that called a particular color “red” or “green” or “blue” is a lot higher than the percentage of girls that did the same. We should run the data to see how much more females do use qualifiers.

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  32. So… yeah. Survey was awesome. Poster is a good idea. But what really confused me is this: Some of the comments in front of me are labeled ‘May 5, 2010 at 7:27 or 8:00 pm.’
    It’s only 7:23.
    Future-comment-time-travelling?
    Because of color-freakedness?

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  33. Sorry if this has already been asked, but I was wondering if it’s possible to provide the mean, mode, (?min) and max number of colours answered out of curiosity? And perhaps the average and max time spent answering the survey?

    If I were any good at processing this type of data set I would do it myself, but I’ve come to realise that often it’s better to rely on the talents of those who are better and faster!

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  34. Pannonica: Seriously? This fascinating subject which he did such a disservce to was on A WEBCOMIC SITE. Give the guy a break–he’s not claiming perfection or asking for publication in your journal…there are lists devoted to just how silly people were in their responses. He simply posted a marveously entertaining, maybe-or-not relevant/accurate, non-professional-statistician’s analysis of the data we all gave him. This for fun, not an AP test. I appreciated all the work! 🙂

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  36. What? It’s a real color, named after Elaine’s brother. He’s a pretty talented artist.

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  37. I discovered the other day that I couldn’t spell fuchsia. Except now I can, because of the enduring shame of spelling it wrong. I favor “fuschia” I guess but that red line underneath it mocks me. Mocks. I still have to think about it more than I should.

    But since apparently Google can’t spell it either, I’m pretty sure it’s ok.

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  38. I’m one of those people who put “I am skewing your results aren’t I?” Of course, I assume there were many of us.

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  41. “I dropped out people who gave too many answers which weren’t colors used by many other people.”
    Hm… so if I gave some really specific names, would they have been dropped? Would [adjective] [color name] have been dropped, as in “pale purple”
    How about [color name]ish [color name], as in “blueish green”?

    Anyways, this survey was lovely to participate in and the reading the results was even funnier than today’s comic!
    I’m pretty sure the sample is skewed, but the results are still good to know.

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  42. This was a really interesting read, thanks for taking the time to go through FIVE MILLION ANSWERS! You’re amazingly devoted. You forgot to mention how many proper answers the most devoted test subject gave you (2400 was a spam bot, but how many genuine answers did you get from one person?).

    It was fun helping out, but I wish I’d taken the time more than once. Don’t think I gave you more than maybe 30-40 answers. My feminine answers were probably polluted by my year long office position at a clothes webshop, we had 117 color names borrowed from Pantone.

    Maybe someone could take these test results and try to match the average users’ monitor color names with the names Pantone chose for their textile colors. I bet that would be a headache.

    Would also be interesting if speakers of other languages were to get 5 million results and then have some people try to literally translate the foreign answers and see where cultures differ.

    PS. My boyfriend is sitting next to me and he is quite upset that us girls called the salmon color pink. “IT’S BROWN FFS, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!”. He’s a darling.

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  43. Great survey, and I laughed tears reading the comments under Miscellaneous, which give a sense of what people went through answering the survey.

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  44. Perused the results. Spent a fair amount of time typing answers into this thing, in earnest, only to read (disappointed) that people were spamming, typing-in stupid shit, etc., instead of just going somewhere else to commit suicide quietly. Reading the summary above has only entrenched in me further the belief that spammers and the like should be tracked down, and have every bone in every finger in both hands broken with a sledge hammer, (including thumbs, metacarpals, and carpal bones). Spam is the electronic equivalent of graffiti, which every time I see it, I feel sadness, sadness that a member of a race which calls itself “homo sapiens,” or “smart man,” with all his promise, does this, and that this will be the most lasting and significant mark he will leave on the world. How truly pathetic. Remember that next time you see (or consider leaving) graffiti. When ’tis painted o’er, the most enduring mark he could manage to leave will be erased from this world, like a fart in the wind, quickly and gratefully forgotten. But I digress…

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  46. Reading through the list, I was surprised to find “blurple” as a colour. Does that seriously mean it was the most common answer for that question? And I’m another who’d love to be able to buy that poster.

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  47. Also, you should merge the serious results of the color cube with the funny results of the miscellaneous and put it up as one of your comics. I made you a sample to show you what I mean:

    But you left me with few choices of funny things to put on the left hand side, so you ought to have a look at your results and pick out more funny yellow ones.

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  48. On the subject of Rainbow-colour-name-remembering-acronyms, my dad told me a great one that one of his school friends told him:

    Rip Out Your Guts Before I Vomit

    Not beautiful, but functional.

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