Named CSS Color Explorer

Type rebeccapurple into any modern browser's CSS and it renders a real color — no hex code required. This tool lets you browse every color name the web actually recognizes, a list with a surprisingly deep and, in one case, genuinely emotional backstory.

Where CSS's color names actually came from

CSS didn't invent named colors — it inherited them from the X Window System, the display protocol underlying Unix graphical environments since 1987, which shipped a plain-text file called rgb.txt mapping human-readable names to RGB triplets so early Unix programmers didn't have to memorize numeric codes. When CSS Level 1 arrived in 1996, its authors adopted a subset of those same X11 names for convenience. Over successive CSS Color specifications the list grew to the 147 keywords (148 counting a duplicate spelling) recognized today, spanning everything from common words like red and navy to oddities like papayawhip and mediumspringgreen.

The one name with a real story behind it

The most recent addition, rebeccapurple (#663399), was added to the CSS Color Module Level 4 draft in 2014 by CSS co-creator Eric Meyer, in memory of his daughter Rebecca, who died of brain cancer shortly before her seventh birthday. Purple was her favorite color. Browser vendors implemented it within weeks specifically as a quiet, permanent tribute embedded directly into a web standard used by billions of pages — almost certainly the only CSS keyword with a documented, publicly known personal origin.

Why anyone still uses named colors in 2026

• Readability in code review — color: tomato communicates intent faster to a human reader than color: #ff6347, even though they're the identical color.
• Quick prototyping — sketching a layout without committing to a final brand palette, using memorable names instead of placeholder hex values.
• Teaching CSS — named colors are frequently a beginner's first exposure to the color property, before hex or rgb() syntax is introduced.
• Special keywords — beyond the 147 named colors, CSS also defines functional keywords like transparent and currentColor, which this list documents alongside the named set.

Frequently asked questions

Are named colors exactly equivalent to their hex codes? Yes — every named color maps to one fixed hex value defined in the CSS specification; there is no ambiguity or rendering variation between browsers.

Why are there duplicate-looking names like "gray" and "grey"? The CSS Color spec deliberately supports both British and American spellings for every "gray/grey" compound name (like darkgray/darkgrey) as an accessibility concession to how differently English speakers spell the word.

Can I use named colors in SVG too? Yes — SVG's color property accepts the identical named-color list defined by CSS, since both specifications share the same underlying color keyword table.

Further reading

• MDN — <named-color> — The complete, authoritative list of all 147 CSS named colors and their hex values.
• Wikipedia — Web colors — History of the X11-derived naming system CSS inherited, including the rebeccapurple story.