19 Color names for "Basic Color"

Grey (more common in British English) or gray (more common in American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning literally that it is "without color", because it can be composed of black and white. It is the color of a cloud-covered sky, of ash and of lead. The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in 700 CE. In Europe and North America, surveys show that grey is the color most commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty, old age, indifference, and modesty. Only one percent of respondents chose it as their favorite color.

Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have often been used to describe opposites such as good and evil, the Dark Ages versus Age of Enlightenment, and night versus day. Since the Middle Ages, black has been the symbolic color of solemnity and authority, and for this reason it is still commonly worn by judges and magistrates. Black is the most common ink color used for printing books, newspapers and documents, as it provides the highest contrast with white paper and thus is the easiest color to read. Similarly, black text on a white screen is the most common format used on computer screens.

Green is a color between the yellow and blue colors in the rainbow. Green is a primary color (a color that can be mixed with another color) of light. The others are red and blue. Green and blue are next to each other on the spectrum, and there are languages which do not distinguish between them. Examples are old Chinese, Thai, old Japanese, and Vietnamese. Green paint can be made by mixing yellow paint and blue tempera paint together. Green light, like all light, is quanta—composed of photons. The wavelength of green light is about 550 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter). Most leaves of growing plants, such as trees and bushes, are green. This is because there is a chemical in leaves, called chlorophyll, which is colored green.

Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, purples are created with a combination of red and blue pigments. In the CMYK color model used in printing, purples are made by combining magenta pigment with either cyan pigment, black pigment, or both.

Cyan is the color between green and blue on the visible spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a predominant wavelength between 490 and 520 nm, between the wavelengths of green and blue. Colors in the cyan color range are teal, turquoise, electric blue, aquamarine, and others described as blue-green. In X11 colors, this color is called both cyan and aqua. Aqua as color name is in use since 1598 and commonly associated with water, such as the appearance of the water at a tropical beach.

White is the brightest color. White light can be made by putting all the other colors of light on the spectrum together. These other colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, collectively called the "rainbow colors" or "spectrum colors." White is linked with light, goodness, innocence, purity, cleanliness and virginity. It is sometimes thought to be the color of perfection. The opposite of black, white usually has a positive connotation. White can stand for a successful beginning. In heraldry, white depicts faith and purity.

Red (RGB), RGB red, or electric red is the brightest possible red that can be reproduced on a computer monitor. This color is an approximation of an orangish red spectral color. It is one of the three primary colors of light in the RGB color model, along with green and blue. This color is also the color called red in the X11 web colors, which were originally formulated in 1987. It is also called color wheel red. It is at precisely zero (360) degrees on the HSV color wheel, also known as the RGB color wheel

Navy blue is a dark shade of the color blue. Navy blue got its name from the dark blue (contrasted with naval white) worn by officers in the Royal Navy since 1748 and subsequently adopted by other navies around the world. When this color name, taken from the usual color of the uniforms of sailors, originally came into use in the early 19th century, it was initially called marine blue, but the name of the color soon changed to navy blue. An early use of navy blue as a color name in English was in 1840 though the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1813.

The color defined as green in HTML/CSS color standard is the color called green, low green, or medium green in many of the older eight-bit computer palettes. Another name for this color is green W3C or office green.

Yellow is the color between green and orange on the light spectrum. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, such as painting and printing. In the RGB color model, used for creating colors on television and computer screens, yellow is a secondary color made by combining red and green at equal intensity. The color box shows the most intense yellow representable in the 8-bit RGB color model. This color is also called "color wheel yellow" and is located at 60 degrees on the HSV color wheel, also known as the RGB color wheel. Its complementary color is blue.

Blue-green is the color that is between green and blue. It belongs to the cyan family of colors.

Olive is a dark yellowish-green color, like that of unripe or green olives. As a color word in the English language, it appears in late Middle English.

Blue is one of the colors of the rainbow that people can see. It is one of the primary colors (colors that can be mixed with other colors) of light, along with red and green. Blue is the color of the Earth's sky and sea. Earth looks blue when seen from outer space by astronauts. Blue is usually associated with masculinity, harmony, conservatism, liberalism, the cold, sadness, calmness and royalty. The color blue is sometimes associated with sadness, which may be where the name of the music style The Blues comes from. Blue is a color of the Jewish religion. In Western cultures since the 1940s, blue is associated with men/boys.

Fuchsia is a vivid pinkish-purplish-red color, named after the color of the flower of the fuchsia plant, which was named by a French botanist, Charles Plumier, after the 16th-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. The first recorded use of fuchsia as a color name in English was in 1892. In the system of additive colors, the RGB color model used to create all the colors on a computer or television display, the colors magenta and fuchsia are exactly the same, and have the same hex number, #FF00FF. The name fuchsia is used on the HTML web color list for this color, while the name magenta is used on the X11 web color list. They are both composed the same way, by combining an equal amount of blue and red light at full brightness.

Teal is a greenish-blue color. Its name comes from that of a bird—the Eurasian teal (Anas crecca)—which presents a similarly colored stripe on its head. The word is often used colloquially to refer to shades of cyan in general. It can be created by mixing cyan into a green base, or deepened as needed with black or gray. The complementary color of teal is pink. It is also one of the first group of 16 HTML/CSS web colors formulated in 1987. In the RGB model used to create colors on computer screens and televisions, teal is created by reducing the brightness of cyan to about one half.

Aqua (Latin for "water") is a variation of the color cyan. The normalized color coordinates for the two web colors named aqua and cyan are identical. It was one of the three secondary colors of the RGB color model used on computer and television displays. In the HSV color wheel aqua is precisely halfway between blue and green. However, aqua is not the same as the primary subtractive color named process cyan used in printing. The words "aqua" and "cyan" are used interchangeably in computer graphics, and especially web design, to refer to the additive secondary color "cyan". Both colors are made exactly the same way on a computer screen, by combining blue and green light at equal and full intensity on a black screen. Traditionally, that color, defined as #00FFFF in hex, or (0,255,255) in RGB. The #00FFFF color code is called "cyan" in the RGB color but the X11 color names introduced the alternative name "aqua" for #00FFFF in 1987. Later, W3C popularized the name by using it in the named color palette of HTML 3.2 specifications.

Maroon is a brownish crimson color that takes its name from the French word marron, or chestnut. "Marron" is also one of the French translations for "brown". According to multiple dictionaries, there are variabilities in defining the color maroon. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines maroon as a dark reddish-purple color while its "American Dictionary" section defines maroon as dark brown-red. This suggests slight perceptual differences in the U.K. versus North America. Lexico online dictionary defines maroon as a brownish-red. Similarly, Dictionary.com defines maroon as a dark brownish-red. The Oxford English Dictionary describes maroon as "a brownish crimson (strong red) or claret (purple color) color," while the Merriam-Webster online dictionary simply defines it as a dark red.

Since version 3.2 of HTML "silver" is a name for one of the 16 basic-VGA-colors.

The web color named "lime", in the CSS color scheme maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has the identical normalized color coordinates as the color green, as found in X11 color names formulized over 1985–1989. The web color lime / X11 color green match the green primary color of the RGB color model. The W3C web color named green is darker than the color named green in X11, using the HTML color code #008000 as compared to the color code #00FF00 in X11. This lime versus green issue is one of the very few clashes between web and X11 colors in the CSS color scheme.