What Color?

550 color words from Merriam-Webster, sorted by hue. The eight hue families run left to right around the color wheel; within each column the words are ordered by the dictionary's own definition, so the top of a column leans toward the family on its left and the bottom toward the family on its right (purple wraps back to pink). Brown, white, and black sit apart as neutrals. Every word links to its entry at merriam-webster.com. The swatches follow the dictionary rather than my eye: Merriam-Webster describes colors in the terms of the ISCC–NBS system (“a moderate reddish brown,” “a light grayish purplish red”), a public-domain vocabulary of 267 named color regions developed by the National Bureau of Standards. Each swatch shows the sRGB centroid of the region the definition names, using the values computed by Paul Centore (2016). Words the dictionary defines identically get identical swatches, which is the honest result. The small label under each word is its ISCC–NBS category.