Where the color names come from

The pool at a glance

Close Hue draws daily and unlimited puzzles from a pool of 6,177 unique color names, merged from four primary sources. Each entry carries its source so provenance is preserved end-to-end.

The combined pool (6,177) is smaller than the sum of the kept counts (6,177) because of cross-source name deduplication. Same name from two sources keeps the higher-priority entry; see the merge order below.

Why these four sources

Each source contributes a distinct flavor of name. Diversity matters because players see hundreds of unique colors over time — a pool dominated by one source would feel monotone, and the puzzle would start clustering on a narrow slice of the gamut.

• Hand-curated — establishes the difficulty calibration. Names like Hornet Sting, Velvet Wine, Storm Cloud with hex values deliberately spread across hue, saturation, and lightness to avoid clustering.
• Wikipedia — historical and cultural names with strong citation backing: Coquelicot (French corn poppy), Falu Red (Falun copper mines), Glaucous (Latin glaucus, sea-green), Xanadu (the philodendron).
• meodai (goodName subset) — modern, whimsical, narrative register: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, 3AM in Shibuya, Adrift on the Nile, Abandoned Spaceship. Trusted curation; we use only the goodName-flagged entries from the upstream 31k-name CSV.
• xkcd — the 2010 crowdsourced color survey from xkcd.com/color/rgb: ~150,000 participants named random colors. The 954 names with most consensus are kept (after a banned-word filter to drop crude entries).

Filtering methodology

Each source is filtered before merging. The goal is to keep names that are evocative and useful for a guessing game, and drop entries that are too generic, too parochial, or low quality.

Wikipedia (911 → 753)

meodai (4,926 → 4,681)

We keep only entries flagged goodName by meodai. No further filter on top — meodai's curation is trusted as expert work. The remaining ~245 dropped entries are name collisions resolved by merge priority.

xkcd (950 → 587)

A banned-word filter removes ~30 crude entries from the crowdsourced survey (puke, vomit, snot, etc.). The remaining ~330-name gap from the original 950 is also from cross-source dedupe — common names like "red" or "navy blue" that already exist in higher-priority sources keep the original entry.

Merge priority

On case-insensitive name collision, earlier sources win:

1. Hand-curated — preserves established difficulty calibration
2. Wikipedia — citation-backed, useful for etymology
3. meodai — largest pool, modern register
4. xkcd — crowdsourced consensus; lowest priority because survey hexes sometimes drift from historical references

Each entry in the final pool carries a source field naming which list it came from, so priority decisions remain inspectable and the data can be filtered per-source for product features (e.g., "hand-curated only" hard mode).

What we excluded, and why

• Pantone & Crayola full sets — licensing for commercial use is murky for Pantone, and many Crayola entries are kid-pun names ("Booger Buster") that don't fit the puzzle's tone.
• meodai's full 31k-entry CSV — the unflagged 27k entries include a meaningful fraction of paint catalog SKUs and brand SKU names. We trust the maintainer's goodName filter instead of re-curating.
• CSS named colors as a primary source — too generic ("blanchedalmond", "papayawhip") and already covered by higher-quality sources.

Attribution

Color names sourced in part from Wikipedia's List of colors under CC BY-SA 4.0; from meodai/color-names under MIT; and from the xkcd color survey under CC0.

Related

See how scoring works to read about the CIEDE2000 ΔE formula that turns guess-vs-target color distance into a 0–100 score.