Color Name Finder — nearest named color
Enter a HEX or RGB color to find its nearest named color, with close alternatives — all in your browser.
🔒 Runs entirely in your browser. Your input and output are never sent to a server or stored — fully private.
Click a name or hex to copy it.
About this tool
This color name finder takes a HEX or RGB value and tells you the closest named color, along with a few near matches to compare. Type or paste a color and it searches a list of named colors to find the nearest one — useful for describing a shade in plain words, naming design tokens, or finding a friendly label for a hex code from a screenshot. Everything is matched in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
How does it find the nearest color name?
It measures the distance between your color and each entry in its list of named colors, then returns the one that is mathematically closest. Because it compares numerical values rather than guessing, two very similar shades can still map to different names when they fall on either side of a boundary.
Why is the result a nearest match and not an exact name?
There are millions of possible colors but only a few hundred to a thousand widely recognized names, so most exact hex values have no official name of their own. The tool finds the closest recognized color instead, which is why it also shows alternatives — the one that reads best in your context may not be the very nearest.
Does this work without sending my color to a server?
Yes. The named-color list and the matching both live in your browser, so the colors you look up are never uploaded and the tool keeps working even offline.
Where does the list of colour names come from?
The set is built on the CSS named colours, the 140-odd keywords every browser understands — from common ones like teal and salmon to oddities like rebeccapurple. They are useful precisely because they are unambiguous: writing gold in CSS gives exactly #FFD700 in every browser. Note the list is a historical accident rather than a designed palette, so its coverage is uneven, with many named greens and comparatively few named browns.
Is closeness measured on RGB distance or on how the eye sees it?
Plain RGB distance treats the three channels as equal, which does not match vision — the eye is far more sensitive to green than to blue, so two colours the same RGB distance apart can look obviously different or nearly identical. Perceptual spaces such as CIELAB were designed so that equal distances look equally different, and matching in one of those gives names that feel right rather than merely being arithmetically nearest. If a suggested name looks off to you, trust your eye: named colours are sparse, and the nearest one can still be some way away.