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. Could you post a version of the color map but for colorblind people? I’d be curious to see how their answers var from normal color vision.

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  4. I’m surprised (to put it mildly) that “turquoise” doesn’t appear anywhere in your lists. Is that the most significant of my responses? Probably not. It just stands out. Times change, language changes . . .

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  8. Great article! I agree with Clara, times are changing. I find in defining colors I’m less likely to think of the name on the colored pencil and more likely to think of where they would be on the RGB cube.

    new favorite word: Blurple

    I did a little calculating… pulled out all the names that contained “blue” (wow that work looks like its spelled wrong after copying/pasting 3 times)…

    there are 101 different versions of “*modifier* blue” that don’t contain a variation of grey, green or purple (also didn’t include “bluish”)
    including:
    bright blue
    royal blue
    deep blue
    medium blue
    electric blue
    cobalt blue
    dull blue
    cadet blue
    neon blue
    marine blue
    faded blue
    denim blue
    prussian blue
    cerulean blue
    carolina blue
    primary blue
    french blue
    muted blue
    ultramarine blue
    cool blue
    water blue
    vibrant blue
    vivid blue
    light light blue
    metallic blue
    dodger blue
    warm blue
    rich blue
    flat blue
    clear blue
    ugly blue (I thought that was a very pretty color myself!)
    nice blue
    tiffany blue
    off blue
    blue blue
    windows blue (haha, another favorite answer of mine)
    strong blue

    apparently “bluey” is a word…

    (there are 11 variations of blue/green, 10 of blue/gray and 13 blue/purple, not including any spellings were blue is something like “bluish” since I searched “blue”.)

    Thank you, interesting read!

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  10. @Nick B – I’m not sure that the colourblindness data will be accurate enough to draw any inference from – there’s more than one type (deuteranope, tritanope… um, some others too). The survey didn’t ask which type of colourblindness the person has.

    (Broadly, you get red-green and yellow-blue blindness, but it’s dead complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness )

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  11. i found it interesting that salmon appears on the male side of of the responses. I’d be willing to bet it’s because salmon was a color option for the original Halo game.

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  12. Haha, this is epic! 😀

    “are you actually going through these answers? must be dull as all hell”. Lolz, it’s actually quite entertaining (clearly). ^^

    Hahahaha, “baige” XD. -________-“

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  18. I am amazed at this read, could you just inform me how did you select your victims for the questoins, I sooo wish I had been one of them because I am so fascinated by colours and their sort of beaming on us.

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  20. So, I’m russian and it was really hard to translate such color names as:
    “ядовито-зеленый”-“poison green” in word-to-word translation
    “лиственный”-the same way “leaf green”
    The color name “хаки” there are no such word in english. So, I think, there are a lot influence a number of color names in mother language.
    Also, “fuschia” in russian has word strong determinate: “фуксия”, “fuksia”, it means.

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  22. on the colourblindness bit a possibly useful chart would be one where the answers overwhelmingly agree with the non colourblind ones. i.e. potential ‘safe’ colours.

    Simply apply an alpha channel to the existing picture as correlation normalised from some cutoff threshold perhaps?

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  23. Don’t forget culture bias.
    Teal did not exist as a colour (!) in the UK until about 3 years ago. Unless you get LL Bean or Land’s End catalogues then most people probably still don’t recognise it.
    Come to think of it, maybe more females read catalogues than males and therefore they have learned better colour vocabulary…

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  24. The most amazing piece of research I have come across in a long while.. XKCD ROCKS!!! may I ask which software did u use to analyse the responses??

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  25. I think the colors in the ‘assorted colors’ section got screwy… the one next to the maybe a half hour before the first stars start showing up in the night sky is certainly off.

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  27. Important to remember: Consumer industry targets women, and they’ve assaulted us with make ups with names like “dusty rose” “desert teal,” etc. Same with colors of bedsheets, nail polish, shoes, etc. So terms like that are part of our vocabulary from early on – but only because they were put there by markerting, etc. Boys are given the same treatment.

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  28. I am SO glad you did something with this information, purely because after about 10 minutes of answering, having not yet reached the end of the FRICKIN’ SURVEY, I was convinced you were just playing a huge prank on all of us and was preparing to hunt you down with a shotgun…

    But apparently you weren’t, and I didn’t, so all is well *smiles sweetly*
    🙂

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  30. I would like to see the colors by name chart and map results for the color blind folk. I’m colorblind and none of this makes sense to me.

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  32. So… I started reading this with just one tab in my browser. Now, I am done, and I have 2 PDFs, 7 Wikipedia Articles, 4 tabs to various places in the XKCD universe (not including this one), and 5 Google tabs.

    Mr. XKCD… You have created a monster.

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  33. This is just a test to see how many comments are in between my last post and this one. I should be posting them roughly a minute and a half in between…

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  34. awwwww……. that works really well sometimes. i guess i should have expected that seeing the times of older posts. im just gonna stop.

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  35. One culturally interesting point is the color called “grapefruit”. I think most non-Americans speakers of English would say grapefruit is yellow

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  36. So because of the spam filter, if I answered the survey in german or using the exact hexadecimal value of the colors it was thrown out?

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  41. after a while, some of the same colors started changing colors on m, like it was liek, i don’t remember if i put green or green blue for this one? lol and blue woudl look blue green and blue green would look blue, i thik i went crazy haha

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  42. I think i left the I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU AKS ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS quote but i do not remember! Arrgghhh! why must it be anonymous!!!!

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  43. Please make a full-color poster, that shit with the letters covering quarter of the image wouldn’t make a beautiful poster. And I like the ideea too much to let get lost.

    so, please correct this.

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  44. The most amazing piece of research I have come across in a long while.. XKCD ROCKS!!! may I ask which software did u use to analyse the responses?? im eager to know about it…

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  46. Linguist Robert MacLaury studied similarity and distinctiveness in color categorization, which has tons to do with culture and language. Oh boy! This rocks. Thanks XKCD!

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  47. I don’t speak Russian, but I can sound out Cyrillic … it seems to me “хаки” should correspond to the English “khaki”

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  48. Anon Russian guy said:
    “o, I’m russian and it was really hard to translate such color names as:
    “ядовито-зеленый”-”poison green” in word-to-word translation
    “лиственный”-the same way “leaf green”

    English does have the expression “poison green”, “poisonous green, and “venomous green”. Likewise, “leaf green”.

    “The color name “хаки” there are no such word in english.”

    Khaki is a color name in English. We stole it from Hindustani and Persian, same as Russian did. 🙂

    “Also, “fuschia” in russian has word strong determinate: “фуксия”, “fuksia”, it means.”

    Everybody took that from the flower “fuchsia”, which is named after Mr. Fuchs.

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  49. I admit I felt tempted to type “FUCK OFF WITH THE FIVE THOUSAND SHADES OF GREEN ALREADY” at a certain point but felt bad and reconsidered.

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  50. We loved this quiz and the results were hilarious and interesting! Thanks for this!

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