Give it any color and it tells you the closest named color, how far away that name is, and a short description such as dark vivid blue. It also shows the color as HEX, RGB and HSL, so you can drop it into code. Handy for naming the colors in a brand guide, writing design notes, or finding the CSS keyword nearest to a hex code from a logo.
A color name is a label for a region, not a single point. Millions of colors exist on a screen and only a few hundred have common names, so almost any color you test will be a little different from the name it gets. The distance score tells you how big that gap is. A small gap means the name is a fair description; a large gap means you are describing something between named colors.
People also disagree about names. What one person calls teal another calls blue-green, and the CSS list contains some surprises: its green is a fairly dark shade, and lime is the bright one. Treat the result as a shared vocabulary for notes and code, not as a verdict.
Brand guides usually name colors by role (primary, accent, background) or by a memorable word (harbor, ember). Using the nearest standard name as a starting point helps when you have only a hex code from a logo file and need to say something about it in a brief or a handoff.
In code, prefer role names for variables, because a color called blue stops making sense the day the brand turns green. Keep the descriptive name in a comment beside the hex value so the next person can tell a pale gray-blue from a strong one without opening a color picker.
It converts your color and every named color into CIELAB, a color space built so that the distance between two colors matches how different they look. The name with the shortest distance wins. Comparing in plain RGB would pick worse matches, because equal RGB steps are not equal visible steps.
The standard CSS color keywords such as tomato, cornflowerblue and rebeccapurple. Aliases are shown once: gray and grey are the same color, and so are aqua and cyan, and magenta and fuchsia.
It is the Delta E (CIE76) between your color and the named color, which is the straight-line distance in CIELAB. Zero is an exact match. Values under 1 are not visible to most people, and under about 2 are only noticeable side by side.
Yes. A CSS name such as tomato works, and RGB can be written rgb(255, 99, 71), 255, 99, 71 or 255 99 71. HEX works with or without the # sign, in 3 or 6 digits. Any alpha value is ignored.
No. The matching runs entirely in your browser.
Related: Hex color picker, Color contrast checker, Color palette from image.
Start for free or see all free tools. We.Inc is free to start, with no card needed. AI building is on paid plans from $20 a month.
We.Inc is an AI-powered website builder you can resell under your own brand. Launch a branded client dashboard, bill on Stripe Connect, and deliver AI-generated websites in minutes. White-label plans start at $99 a month for 25 client sites, with a 7-day free trial and no per-site fees.