I'm curious to understand the need to have names for such many different colors and I'd love to hear your take! A naive reasoning would say that names are useful if at least two different persons know the meaning for a name and thus it will help communication.

Now I'm not sure how many colors are there in that list, but it feels like there are too many to be practically useful. How do you see this?

I build a lot of tools that generate colorpalettes and I wanted a wide range of nice-sounding names that feel evocative of the colors they represent. I see it as an API between a program and a human.

I started with about 1,600 names scraped from Wikipedia, but with only that many, there were a lot of redundancies and when you disallow duplicates, you end up with colors being labeled as “orange” even though they don’t actually look orange. On top of that many of the names were racist or at least questionable (so are many names on colornames.org)

Other large lists like the Pantone one, don't have a permissive license.

So for the past ten years or so, I’ve been collecting color names in a very unscientific way. It slowly turned into a hobby—something I often do on vacation, especially when I’m surrounded by unfamiliar places, dishes, or objects where color is used in unexpected ways.

Tools I made that benefit from using the names:

- https://meodai.github.io/poline/ - https://words.github.io/color-description/ - https://farbvelo.elastiq.ch/ - https://codepen.io/meodai/pen/PoaRgLm - https://parrot.color.pizza/ - https://meodai.github.io/rampensau/

And probably some that I forgot about...