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The Internet is an amalgam of forms blurred under epistemological pressures. In Søren Kierkegaard’s words, under this flat shower of leveled information, where everybody is interested in everything and nothing is too trivial or too important, people just accumulate information and postpone decisions indefinitely, i.e., nobody takes action and nobody is responsible for truth — there is no mastery, just gossip. He called this the æsthetic sphere of existence, exhorting us to evolve to the ethical sphere, where we do not just accumulate information but take action and make commitments. Blogs are instruments to overcome flatness by creating opportunities for vertical activities. In this sense this blog is a view from my window — a collection of tidbits I judged relevant to computational color science and in general to the promotion of scientific excellence in areas of strategic importance for the future of research, economy and society.
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» An On-Line Color Thesaurus
Color names are a powerful means of selecting and communicating colors. There are a variety of color vocabularies and dictionaries available but there has been less work in capturing the similiarities and differences in color naming. This post is a tool post in that the online color thesarus is embedded directly in the post.

Getting Started
To use the online color thesaurus, simply type the color name in the text field below. Once you have typed in your color name click on "submit" and then the results will be displayed. You can use the "clear" button to clear the text field.


Results
The results that are returned are a large color square with a rendering of the color if it was found. If the name was not found, for example "greeb" was entered, then the next nearest color name in terms of edit distance, in this case "green", will be returned. So no you won't have to remember how to spell fuchsia. In addition to the colored square are the corresponding RGB and hexadecimal values. Finally there is a note about how common the color name is. Below this are the color synonyms and antonyms. Each column has smaller color squares rendering the color names and the names with links so that you can easily click-through to these names. The results are based on analysis of 20,000+ color name database in English collected from a 20+ language ongoing online color naming experiment.

Posted by Giordano Beretta or Nathan Moroney on Monday, October 29, 2007 7:46 PM
Permalink | Trackbacks (19) | Comments(19)

Comments for An On-Line Color Thesaurus

Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

Pretty neat - would be nice to see the tool in other languages as well. I have a hard time rembering some of my color names in Spanish so it would be nice to see a translation option as well.

Posted by juadlam on 10/30/2007 2:38 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

juadlam, that is actually an excellent idea. We could use the power of the Web and display editable fields next to the color patch in the response for all languages instead just English. When a field is empty, persons who know the name in that language could just fill out the field and upload their suggestion. Thanks for the tip!

Posted by GiordanoBeretta on 10/31/2007 12:26 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

This is definitely a good idea. I'm agree with the other people, it would be really nice to have the possibility to enter other name from different languages (French for me). The thing that would be also nice would be to have a color wheel to search, and fall directly on the names. So we could have 2 different ways of input : either the name or the color wheel. Why couldn't we also have an average Pantone conversion ?

Posted by syldar999 on 11/1/2007 8:17 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

Thanks for the encouraging comments. I think the color gradient input option is a good suggestion and certainly a feature in other color pickers. We started with this design since it's a simple text and hexidecimal encoded version and has a simple interface but expect with a little extra work we could add the color wheel option. As for the Pantone conversion, this is an interesting idea but given that Pantone is a proprietary system outside of HP it is not something we could add with prior approval of Pantone.

Posted by NathanMoroney on 11/1/2007 8:29 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

http://www.colr.org has an API that could be used to improve search results. For instance, try searching on "fish" or "lobster".

Posted by daltonlp@gmail.com on 11/1/2007 10:26 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

Nathan, This is a very nice application. Congratulations. I agree with you that color language is a powerful and useful means of color specification for many applications. Geoff

Posted by gwoolfe on 11/2/2007 10:58 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus -- Cardinal

May I suggest a color that I was surprised not to find? Cardinal -- the color of Stanford University -- the landlord of HP headquarters. According to the Stanford University design guideline page http://www.stanford.edu/group/identity/de_color.html the color is also Pantone 201. Tom

Posted by tdicorcia on 11/2/2007 6:27 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

This is a touchy subject, so to speak, but the rendition of "skin" is a bit problematic.

Posted by jamurrell on 11/3/2007 2:57 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

gwoolfe - Thanks for the kind and supportive words about the tool. They are much appreciated.

tdicorcia - Thanks for the feedback and pointer to Stanford Cardinal red. I don't do any individual editing of the thesaurus itself but make use of the natural language usage of thousands of web volunteers to determine the names. I might also suggest that some people might use cardinal red to refer to the bird as well (which presumably is pretty close;)

jamurrell - I agree and am sensitive to the issue you raise. These results are based on the online color naming experiment but since I didn't collect any demographic information I am assuming that the participants that chose to use this color name probably could have been more specific. I suggest we assume the modifiers "light" or "caucasian" apply to the current results for "skin" and hope that with future versions, a potentially more diverse pool of participants and more sepcific names, that this assumption will not be necessary. Thank you for your feedback.

Posted by NathanMoroney on 11/11/2007 2:43 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

The results are based on analysis of 20,000+ color name database in English collected from a 20+ language ongoing online color naming experiment. ----------------- There seem to be well under 2000 colors here. I did my own analysis. Do you plan to add any more?

Posted by retsof1 on 11/14/2007 8:36 AM
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the edge .... of brightness

What is "blue bright", hex=000000? What is "base", hex=CC9999? It's also "dusky pink".

Posted by retsof1 on 11/14/2007 10:23 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

Hey Nathan -- Great Job!! I loved playing. Spent WAY too much time. Just a note that you have "torquise" in your dictionary, in addition to "turquoise".

Posted by chromagirly on 11/15/2007 10:49 AM
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favorite color name so far...

...is "grandma". It's perfect!

Posted by chromagirly on 11/15/2007 11:06 AM
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Torquise

Torquise? It gets better. A blog on http://colourlovers.com notes that T-Mobile, the German cellphone company, claims ownership of the colo(u)r magenta. They have already sued others trying to use it in a commercial campaign, even as part of a palette of other colors. Search in this thesaurus for "T-Mobile". What do you get? TORQUISE. I think that they should have it, in exchange for magenta.

Posted by retsof1 on 11/15/2007 12:06 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

retsof1 - You're right there are a little over 800 names in the thesaurus. The full 20,000+ database is used to compute these 800 names. I will try to get a post done soon based on a recent paper that I presented on the color thesaurus. As for the 3 other color names, you mention I expect "blue bright" is an outlier and should be reviewed (I didn't look at each individual color) and as for the other two names, I'm not familiar with them.

chromagirly - glad you like the tool, thanks. I will look at the spell checking portion of my processing to see how "torquise" was handled. I also hadn't seen "grandma" until you pointed it out ;)

Posted by NathanMoroney on 11/15/2007 3:59 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

It is pretty useful, but I am wondering if the RGB it showed is specific for one kind of monitor. If not, for kinds of monitors people have what is the use?

Posted by binghua_chai@hotmail.com on 12/7/2007 1:45 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

When no monitor is specified, you can safely assume it is sRGB. Most common monitors have the sRGB primaries and you only need to make sure you have set correctly the gamma (there are several free visual tools for this on the Web) and the white point is D65, which is a setting in the monitor or the display driver.

Posted by GiordanoBeretta on 12/7/2007 10:30 AM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/~jaffer/Color/Dictionaries#CNE-2007 has a critique of the Color-Naming-Experiment (comparing it with other color dictionaries):

In 2003, Nathan Moroney presented Unconstrained web-based color naming experiment, at the SPIE/IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium. It describes a website he created (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/color-name-hpl.html) which invites visitors to submit names for 7 randomly chosen colors. These are collected, vetted, and averaged to create a color dictionary which can be queried at http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/color/archive/2007/10/29/4914.html.

Each query returns a color with its sRGB coordinates, a 3-level indication of how popular the name was, and four nearby named colors as well. By tracing the nearby colors, John Foster collected 871 named colors from the website.

Moroney's paper reveals that the randomly chosen colors have coordinates selected from only 6 values which are uniformly spaced from 0 to 255. But sRGB is not a perceptually uniform color space! This results in the dark colors being severely underrepresented among the colors presented for naming. The CNE RGB-cube shows artifacts of the limited dark samples: the darkest octant is nearly empty; and clumping is visible along the half-intensity axes.

Compared with the Resene-2007 RGB-cube, the CNE RGB-cube is seen to be distended from around the neutral (black-to-white) axis into saturated primaries which lie outside of the print (reflective) gamut.

The paucity of dark colors also hides some inherent technical issues. Coordinates for dark color names are likely to show more relative variation than the light colors because displays have more variation in contrast ratio, blackpoint, and dark color balance than they do in the highlights.

CNE-core-2007.txt is a subset of the CNE dictionary containing only the 212 "widely used", and "less commonly used" colors. Looking at its RGB-cube shows the darkest octant emptiness is worse than for the full CNE, perhaps reflecting that agreement between subjects is harder to obtain for dark colors.

The Color-Naming-Experiment could be improved by rewriting the webpage to:

* generate random colors with component resolutions of tens or hundreds of values, not just 6 values;

* generate random colors in a more perceptually uniform color space than sRGB, such as CIEL*a*b* or CIEL*u*v*;

* set the background color of the page. Moreover, using a black background would harness the human visual system to compensate for some of the differences in blackpoint, improving the agreement of darker colors.

All that being said, the Color-Naming-Experiment dictionary is still an improvement over X11. It is good for light sources and mediocre for surface colors.

Posted by AJHP@VOLUNTOCRACY.ORG on 4/27/2008 8:07 PM
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Re: An On-Line Color Thesaurus

AJHP, Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful comment. I had seen this on the linked page above but appreciate the cross-link and in-line posting. The proposed suggestions are apprciated and merit some detailed discussion. I will write a separate post though to go into more detail (since writing up a full response in the comment text area is a little confining). I will add a comment with a link forward once I've posted a reply. Thanks again,

Posted by NathanMoroney on 5/2/2008 12:57 PM
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