Color shade names
CSS defines 148 colour names, 139 distinct colours once you drop duplicates like gray and grey. Here are 40 of them spread around the colour wheel, so you can put a name to a shade and copy its code.
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At a glance
- Distinct colours among them
- 139 (gray/grey, aqua/cyan, fuchsia/magenta and the other grey spellings share values)
- Source: w3.org, checked 2026-11
- Names from the original VGA palette
- 16: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, yellow
- Source: w3.org, checked 2026-11
- Where most other names come from
- The X11 colour system used on Unix, later adopted into SVG
- Source: w3.org, checked 2026-11
Give your page these colours
A Liite page comes with 15 themes, from sunset to midnight, and your own colours on top. Pick the one closest to your palette and your link-in-bio page is ready in a few minutes.
Color shade names: what to know
This page starts the colour palette generator for this case. For every option and how to use it, see the colour palette generator.
Where colour names come from
The 16 oldest names came from the VGA palette and were adopted into HTML. Most of the rest come from the X11 colour system on Unix computers, by way of SVG. That's why the list has oddities like papaya whip and blanched almond next to plain red and blue.
Names are handy for talking about colour, but they aren't precise. Your designer, printer or developer needs the hex code, which is what the list gives you.
From a name to a palette
Click any name above and it becomes the base colour. The tool then shows its 50–950 scale and three colours spaced evenly around the wheel, so a single name turns into a working palette.
Questions
What are the names of all the different color shades?
There's no single list, but the most widely used is the set CSS defines: 148 names, from alice blue to yellow green. Forty of the most useful are listed on this page with their hex codes.
Do colour names mean the same thing everywhere?
No. Paint brands, fashion labels and design tools each use their own names. Only the hex code pins down an exact on-screen colour.