---
name: Named color
slug: named-color
category: color
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: One of the CSS keywords such as tomato or rebeccapurple that map to
  fixed sRGB values, a fossil vocabulary still useful for prototypes and
  debugging.
aliases:
  - name: CSS color keywords
    source: css
  - name: X11 colors
    source: community
  - name: rebeccapurple
    source: css
  - name: web colors
    source: community
tags:
  - web-platform
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - system-color-keyword
    - hex-color
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "MDN: <color> CSS type"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Values/color_value
  - title: "MDN: named-color"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the keyword colours built into CSS
---

CSS knows 148 colours by name, and every one of them is a fixed sRGB value with no opinion
about anything else. `tomato` is exactly `#FF6347` in every browser, on every platform, in
every theme, forever. That immovability is the whole character of the vocabulary: a named
colour cannot respond to a [colour scheme](/color-scheme), cannot be retinted by a theme,
and has no place on a ramp, which is why it belongs in sketches and debugging rather than
in a design system. The keywords `transparent` and [currentColor](/currentcolor) sit in the
same syntax slot but are not part of this list; they are computed, not fixed.

The set is inherited rather than designed. Most of it comes from the X11 window system's
colour database by way of early browsers, which is why it has no internal logic at all.
`darkgray` is lighter than `gray`. Both British and American spellings work for the greys
and only for the greys. `aqua` and `cyan` are the same colour under two names, as are
`fuchsia` and `magenta`. Lightness is scattered, hue coverage is lumpy, and the naming
mixes flowers, food, minerals and pure invention. Nothing in the list was chosen to sit
beside anything else in it, so a palette assembled out of keywords will look assembled out
of keywords.

There is one deliberate entry. In 2014 the CSS Working Group added `rebeccapurple`,
`#663399`, in memory of Rebecca Meyer, the daughter of Eric Meyer, who died of brain cancer
on her sixth birthday. She had said she wanted to be called Becca once she turned six, and
purple was her colour. It is the only value in the
[named colour list](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color) that was
added for a reason outside the technology, and it is a good keyword to know for that alone.

Where names still earn their keep is speed and legibility while working. A keyword is
readable in a diff, memorable in a lesson, and impossible to typo into a plausible but
wrong value the way a [hex colour](/hex-color) is, so debugging layout with `outline: 1px
solid hotpink` beats reaching for a token. What they cannot do is scale: no keyword carries
a lightness relationship to another keyword, none of them is defined in a wide
[gamut](/color-gamut), and once a product needs a second theme, every keyword in the
codebase becomes a value that has to be found and named properly.