CSS color names

In practice, named colors are more useful for quick prototyping and readable code than for production design work, where precise brand colors and design system values take priority — but they remain a valid part of the CSS specification and work in every modern browser.

The named colors in CSS have an unusual origin. They didn't start as a carefully curated design palette — they were inherited from the X11 window system, a display server used on Unix workstations in the 1980s.

X11 shipped with a file called rgb.txt that mapped human-readable names to RGB values. These names were contributed by individual developers over the years, with no formal naming convention — which is why the list includes both DarkGray and DarkSlateGray, why Gray is darker than DarkGray, and why you'll find names like PapayaWhip, Moccasin, and LemonChiffon alongside straightforward labels like Red and Blue.

When HTML and CSS needed named colors, the early browser developers adopted the X11 list rather than starting from scratch. The original HTML specification recognized just 16 named colors (the basic VGA palette). CSS 2.1 added orange. CSS3 expanded the list to 147 by formally incorporating the X11 names. The 148th — RebeccaPurple (#663399) — was added in 2014 as a tribute to Rebecca Meyer, the young daughter of CSS pioneer Eric Meyer, who passed away from brain cancer at age six.

The full list has remained unchanged since then. While modern CSS offers far more precise color tools — hex, RGB, HSL, and the newer OKLCH and LCH color spaces — the named colors persist as a convenient shorthand and a small piece of web history.