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”

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  6. Here’s a new rainbow acronym, ROFLMAO:
    Red, Orange, Fuxia, Lavender, Magenta, Amber, Ochre.
    (“ocre” occurs at least once in rgb.txt)

    Not a shade of green!

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  8. I’m a guy and I tried to be as accurate as possible, but that’s just me being OCD >_>. I also think I checked Wikipedia before trying to spell “fuchsia”.
    I LOVED the miscellaneous, though. You are HYSTERICAL!

    Like

  9. Any way that those of us who aren’t crazy techie people and those of us who use Windows (and thus can’t use a tar.gz) could get the data?

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  11. Damn, I am so sorry I didn’t see this soon enough to contribute. The word fuchsia comes from the Fuchs family of Florida, noted orchid and tropical flower breeders in the 20th century. It’s a fairly new word, all in all, but really? Google?

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  13. You know, you COULD make a poster of it and donate the proceeds to charities for colorblind or visually impaired people. That’d be pretty cool.

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  14. I’d like to print out or otherwise make a poster of your results chart, which has a very good font for it, but as far as I can tell, it’s not one contiguous image. Is there a version that is?

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  15. Thanks for being awesome.
    Thanks for causing entertaining thoughts.
    Thanks for bringing a bit of entertainment.
    Thanks fo… *Writer has been eaten by a penis-colored dinosaur*

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  16. I got about twenty-five colors into the survey and typed “this is ridiculous” and gave up. It did get sort of mind-melting after a while. Fun results, though.

    And actually, “fuschia” is the correct spelling of the color name, and “fuchsia” is a kind of orchid (like Jenne said). Clearly that distinction exists only to mess with our brains, but there it is.

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  17. Question: for the record, what were the top 5 “real” colour names that guys picked? (Including, I suppose, the misspelled “baige” [sic])

    I was really looking forward to hearing about actual colours rather than “I weep for my gender” (and oh, I so totally agree with that) because I already have plenty of evidence for the existence of [insert favourite obscene synonym of idiot/jerk here, in plural].

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  18. ha ha-

    who would have though that a genus of shrubs and trees, in the Onagraceae, named to honour a 16th C botanist/herbalist/physician, and from which a colour name was derived.. could cause so much discussion about etymology, spelling and nomenclature?

    I need a beer…

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  20. I *so* wanted to put in “baize” somewhere, but the appropriate colour never came up.

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  21. I actually ended up buying a box of 120 crayola crayons and coloring on my computer screen to see which colors were closest and then labeling them as such. Way too much for my eyes.

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  22. Only just now as I read the funny answers did I realize that I should have answered “#00ff00” for one of them. I’m amazed that no one else thought of putting hexcode approximations either.

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  23. Yes, you can open .tar.gz files on Windows (I’m running XP).
    Do a google search for:

    how to .tar.gz windows

    [The first couple links should work perfectly 🙂 ]

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  24. man, i completely missed this (too much, ultimately anticlimactic election fever around here)… but the results are surprisingly hilarious at the same time as fascinating.
    I pledge my allegiance to changing the X11 colours to match, too. The current selection is hideous.

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  26. did you catch any of those one-in-a-million women who have a 4th color receptor in their retina and can see 100x more colors than “normal” people?

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  29. As a colourblind male who finds it tiring to answer peoples questions about colourblindness, I’d love to see a different chart showing what colourblind people have for their colour boundaries, though I suspect that due to the differences in types of colourblindness it would look more like noise… If someone could do this and it ended up looking interesting I would hang this in my room 🙂

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  30. I was really disappointed that you didn’t mention my results. Even after I went to all the trouble of associating adjectives to the colours so I could spell out the names of my favourite pokemon by the first letter of each adjective.

    PIKACHU and BLASTOISE were the hardest.

    It was still wicked fun doing vocabulary games.

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  31. I haven’t been able to find said colour chart, but there is this page which will show everyone how each type of colour-blindness the colour scheme.

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  33. Taking part in the survey and reading through your results has been surprisingly amusing.

    I’m a geek, aren’t I? 😦

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  36. Here’s a color sex differentiator I’ve used with some success:

    What color is chartreuse?

    A. Green-yellowish

    B. Red-orangish

    Chartreuse is green-yellow. I think this one does well separating men from women, excluding liqueur-drinkers. All women I asked have chosen the right answer, a majority of men have not (including me). Interestingly enough, Crayola got this one wrong originally, in 1972, later renaming the color atomic tangerine (see Wikipedia, color Chartreuse).

    As far as fuchsia goes, I want a t-shirt that says “It should be spelled fuschia”.

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  37. Wow, I’m impressed with the accuracy of the 48 color names you listed. Compare that with the lame naming of colors for X11.

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  39. The only thing they didn’t take into account was the types of people taking this survey. Remember, all the artsy-fartsy people who care about the colors probably aren’t into techno-weenie websites.

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  40. ‘I, too, am wondering what color “penis” is.’

    I’d be happy to show you.

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  42. Beautiful. I love the wide array of color data, and this strange sense of duty melded with comedy.

    It would be amazing to see if there were any geological consistencies – people that live in more forested regions have more words for green colors, et cetra.

    Thanks for slogging through all of this! It was great fun to do!

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  44. Wow. If nothing else, that was certainly exhaustive! The results at the end under “Misc” were absolutely hilarious XD Keep up the great work!

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  45. Fascinating! It would be infinitely cool to analyze for nationality/language (e.g. German vs French) and micro culture (artists vs mathematicians), but I don’t suppose you gathered those kinds of data – and I’ll bet you’re done with running this survey for a while!

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  48. Hey Gobo- LIES! I went to art school, and I was all about color naming in this! Like mint, and cobalt.

    But we don’t really have more names for colors than you normal people.

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  49. I started off seriously, then eventually ended up writing things like “ooooooh, that’s bloody blue!” and “stop making me hungry – that’s Cadbury colour”

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  50. “Day 3: Sanity lost. Colors keep changing but they keep staying the same…”
    ROFLMAO

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