Color Name Finder
Find the closest official CSS color name for any HEX or RGB value — type a code, or upload an image and hover to preview any pixel's color and name live before you click to select it. Perceptual matching, the top 5 closest names, and a searchable browser for all 141 named colors.
How to Find a Color Name
Features
Every Color Has a Nearest Word, Even If Not an Exact One
HEX codes are precise but meaningless to say out loud — nobody describes a brand colour to a client as "#E8845C." Named colours solve that, but a design rarely lands on exactly one of the handful of colours that happen to have an official name. This tool bridges the gap: type any HEX or RGB value and it finds the closest official name, with an honest measure of exactly how close that match actually is.
It works from every direction you might start from — search a name to get its exact HEX code in the Browse tab, start from a HEX code and get the nearest name in Find mode, or skip typing entirely and pull a colour straight out of an image. Most simple colour-name tools only support one of those; this one supports all three from the same 141-name dataset, so the numbers always agree with each other.
Upload an Image, Hover Anywhere, See the Name Instantly
Typing a HEX code only works if you already know it — most of the time, you're actually starting from an image: a logo, a screenshot, a photo of a product you like. The From Image tab is built for exactly that. Drop in any picture and move your mouse across it, and a precision magnifier loupe follows your cursor showing the exact pixel underneath, with its HEX code and closest colour name updating live — before you've clicked anything at all.
Clicking simply confirms whichever pixel you were hovering as your selected colour, feeding it straight into the same match results, save and share tools used everywhere else in this app. Every click also gets added to a small history strip beneath the image, so comparing three or four colours pulled from one logo takes a few clicks instead of re-uploading or re-finding the same spot repeatedly. If you only need to sample one colour rather than name it, the dedicated Color Picker offers the same live magnifier with additional export options built specifically around picking, not naming.
Why 141 Names, and Why Match Quality Matters
The 141 names used here are the official CSS Color Module and X11 keyword set — the same names every browser already understands natively. Type cornflowerblue into any stylesheet and it just works, which is not true of the much larger "creative" colour-name databases some tools use, where names like "Misty Morning Fog" look nice but aren't valid CSS values anywhere.
The trade-off is that most real-world colours won't land exactly on one of those 141 points, which is why every result here comes with a match-quality percentage and a plain-language label instead of just a name. A 98% "Near-exact match" is a genuinely useful substitute; a 61% "Loose match" is still the closest available name, but should be treated as a rough description, not a literal stand-in for your actual colour.
Perceptual Matching — A Small Toggle That Changes the Answer
Plain numeric colour distance treats red, green and blue differences as equally important, which is easy to compute but doesn't match how human vision actually works — the eye is considerably more sensitive to some hue shifts than others. Perceptual matching applies a well-established weighting (the "redmean" formula) that accounts for this, and for colours sitting near the boundary between two named colours, it can genuinely pick a different, more visually sensible name than plain RGB distance would.
Both numbers are always one toggle apart, so it costs nothing to check both — if they agree, you can trust the result with more confidence; if they disagree, that's itself useful information about how ambiguous the colour actually is between two names.
Who Actually Needs to Name a Color
Developers and designers writing CSS who want a real, usable keyword instead of guessing between three similar-looking hex codes in a stylesheet.
Content and documentation writers describing a brand palette in plain language for a style guide, without inventing informal descriptions that mean different things to different readers.
Product and marketing teams discussing a colour choice out loud in a meeting, where "cornflower blue" communicates instantly and a hex code doesn't.
Students and hobbyists curious what an existing colour is actually called, or exploring the full range of named colours by browsing rather than searching for something specific.
From a Screenshot to a Written Style Guide
Writing a brand style guide: run each brand colour through Find Name to get a plain-language reference name alongside the hex code, useful for anyone reading the guide who isn't comfortable with raw colour codes.
Matching several colours from one screenshot or logo: upload it in the From Image tab and hover across the design to preview names live, clicking each colour you need — faster than sampling one at a time with the eyedropper and re-checking results between each pick.
Choosing between two close CSS keywords: when you're not sure whether a colour reads more as "tomato" or "coral," check both the perceptual and RGB results and look at the Other Close Matches row — the percentages make the decision concrete instead of a guess.
Exploring the full named-colour set: use Browse Names with a hue family filter to see every available blue or every available green side by side — often the fastest way to notice a name you didn't know existed.
Nothing Leaves Your Browser
Every match, the perceptual distance calculation, and the entire 141-name search all run locally in your browser — there's no upload and no server round-trip, so results update instantly as you type or drag the colour picker. Saved colours stay in your own browser's local storage rather than an account somewhere else.
Getting a Name You Can Actually Use
- Check the match percentage before trusting a name as a substitute. Anything above roughly 92% is safe to use as a plain-language stand-in; below that, treat the name as a description, not a replacement value.
- Try both matching modes for borderline colours. If perceptual and RGB matching disagree, that itself tells you the colour sits genuinely between two named colours.
- Use Browse Names when you don't have a specific colour yet. Filtering by hue family is often faster than trying to remember what a colour you're picturing might be called.
- Hover before you click when sampling from an image. The live preview updates as you move, so you can scan across a logo or screenshot and settle on the exact pixel before locking anything in.
- Save the exact HEX, not just the name, for anything shipping to production. Named colours are great for communication; the specific HEX value is what should actually go in code or brand documentation.
- Pair this with the Color Wheel if you're choosing a whole scheme, not just naming one colour — see Color Wheel for harmony-based exploration.
When a Result Looks Wrong
The name doesn't look right at all. Check the match percentage first — a low "Loose match" score means no named colour is genuinely close, and the tool is showing the least-bad option rather than a confident answer.
The name changed after I toggled Perceptual Matching. This is expected for colours near the boundary between two names — it means your colour is genuinely ambiguous between them, not that either result is wrong.
My saved colour shows a slightly different name than I remember. Favourites store the exact HEX at save time; the matched name is recalculated live from the currently selected matching mode, so switching Perceptual Matching after saving can show a different name for the same stored colour.
The eyedropper button isn't showing up. The EyeDropper API only works in Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera) — it's hidden automatically in Safari and Firefox rather than shown broken.
The colour I picked from an image looks slightly different than expected. Very large images are scaled to fit the preview width before sampling; if you need a pixel-exact reading from a very high-resolution source, zoom into the relevant area with an image editor first and re-upload the cropped section.
Where This Tool Stops
Don't expect a name for every colour — with only 141 reference points, most real-world colours will be a "close" or "approximate" match rather than exact; check the percentage before treating a name as authoritative.
Don't use named colours as a precision tool — for anything requiring an exact brand colour, use the HEX or RGB value directly rather than the nearest name, which is inherently an approximation.
Don't confuse this with a Pantone or print colour-matching tool — it works entirely in screen colour space (HEX/RGB); print reproduction depends on ink and paper this tool has no way to account for.