CSS Color Reference

All CSS named colors, sorted by hue. Click any card to copy its name; click the hex to copy the hex. Every gray also accepts the grey spelling.

darkgray is lighter than gray

That is not a typo, and it is not the only one. The 148 names look like a designed set — a base name with dark and light variants either side — but they are an accumulation of X11 window-system colours from the 1980s, with prefixes applied by different people at different times and no rule connecting them.

Sorted by actual brightness, darkgray sits above gray — it is almost twice as luminous. Both names are correct in the sense that every browser agrees on them, and neither is correct in the sense of meaning what it says.

Across the whole list, 23 base names have a dark or a light sibling and 6 of those rows break the expected ordering — coral, gray, grey, pink, salmon, seagreen — which is 26%. Two of the six are the same colour under two spellings, so it is 5 distinct colours rather than 6; both numbers are worth having rather than whichever reads better.

And the failures go both ways. darkgray</code>, <code>darkgrey</code>, <code>darksalmon</code>, <code>darkseagreen are all lighter than their base; lightcoral</code>, <code>lightpink are darker than theirs. Most families do behave, which is the point — the prefixes are not backwards, they are simply not a system.

Nine of the names are aliases

148 names resolve to 139 distinct colours, so 9 of them are duplicates:

Seven are the gray/grey spelling pairs, which is a courtesy to two spellings of one word. The other 2 are not spelling at all: aqua and cyan are the same colour under different words, and so are fuchsia and magenta. Those exist because the names arrived from two different places — one set from the original sixteen HTML colours, one from the X11 list — and both were kept rather than either being dropped.

And green is not the greenest green

green is #008000, half brightness. The full-brightness one is lime, 4.6 times more luminous. There is no brightgreen, and "lime" sounds like a shade rather than the primary, so almost nobody reaches for it first.

It is the same historical seam. green came from the sixteen named colours of early HTML, where it meant the darker of two greens; lime came from X11. The result is that the most obvious name points at something two stops darker than the obvious colour, and every other green here except darkgreen is brighter than it.

Which gives the practical advice, and it is short: these names are for prototyping, not for a design system. They are not ordered, not complete and not consistent, and the ones you can safely reason about are black, white, red and blue.