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I was looking for color options for a theme I was working on and there was a bunch of odd names for regular colors. Some of the colors were FireBrick for red, Gainsboro for light grey, NavajoWhite for a subtle yellow color which makes no sense because it is not at all white. Does anyone know why these names exist?

Arnold Daniels
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Plam
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    There are many shades of red; if FireBrick was called red, what would you call all the other reds? They do differ. If you just want the ROYGBIV colors, use them. – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven Jan 15 '16 at 18:36
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    Because Chuck Norris said so: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-think-chucknorris-is-a-color – Josh Crozier Jan 15 '16 at 18:39
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmStJQzclHc – Paulie_D Jan 15 '16 at 18:40
  • All modern browsers support the following 140 color names (click on a color name, or a hex value, to view the color as the background-color along with different text colors). These names exists because, we can call them 'names' and are easily understandable. You may check **[HTML Color Names][1]** [1]: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp – Alfred Jan 15 '16 at 18:41
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    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/tomato-versus-ff6347-the-tragicomic-history-of-css-color-names/ – TylerH Jan 15 '16 at 18:42
  • [Because. I. Like. Colours](http://colours.neilorangepeel.com/) – jbutler483 Jan 15 '16 at 20:49

1 Answers1

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Those extended color names are imported from SVG, which itself takes from the X11 color system. See section 4.3 of css3-color.

If you're asking how those names were chosen to begin with, that's not something anyone but those who originally named the colors can answer (although, according to this mailing list reference from Wikipedia, one of the comments on your question is somewhat on point re: Crayola colors).

BoltClock
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