| Colour name | Place / context | Type | H° | S% | V% | Lum% | Hex | Lat | Lng |
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Earth Colours is a geographical colour encyclopedia — a reference for 243 named colours whose identities are rooted in place. Browse the full list, search by name or hex value, filter by type, and follow each colour back to its corner of the world on the map.
For cartographers and designers, the Earth Palette tool lets you assemble colours from the collection or build perceptually smooth colour gradients.
Colours are geographical, variably derived from earthly material, human visual perception, or place attachment. Many colour names flag a location: Bordeaux from a wine capital, Magenta from a Lombardy battlefield,or Dresden Blue from a local Saxon porcelain tradition. Others evoke visual landscape, from the green of the Amazon to the blue of the Danube. Another category names colours for their physical source: the iron-rich clays near Siena, Vermilion from cinnabar extracted at Almadén, Carmine from cochineal insects in Oaxaca, or lapis lazuli quarried in Badakhshan.
Hover any table row and click + to add a colour. Or click a map marker, then use + Add to palette in the info panel. The tray opens along the bottom of the screen. Drag colour chips to reorder. Use the Sort buttons to arrange by hue, saturation, brightness, or luminance. Hover a chip to reveal the × remove button. Clear empties the palette.
To create map colour gradients, add desired colours to palette — at least 2 for a sequential colour scheme (e.g. ‘high’ to ‘low’), 3 for diverging (e.g. ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘neutral’). The ramp interpolates additional classes through CIELAB colour space, which matches human perception well for cartographic gradients.Choose 3–11 classes. Export as CSV (hex, RGB, HSV), PNG, QGIS XML, or CSS gradient.
| Colour name | Place / context | Type | H° | S% | V% | Lum% | Hex | Lat | Lng |
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This list is compiled from two sources. First, colours with individual Wikipedia articles or entries on the Wikipedia list of colors, which provide stable published references for colour name and value. Second, it uses historically documented geographic colour names from three classic dictionaries indexed and digitized at Jaffer's Color-Name Dictionaries: A Dictionary of Color by Maerz & Paul (McGraw-Hill, 1930), Color Standards and Color Nomenclature by Robert Ridgway (Smithsonian, 1912), and the Plochere Color System (1948). Names compiled from these sources are mapped to the 267 colour centroids developed by NBS/ISCC (Kelly and Judd, 1976). The result is a curated rather than exhaustive collection of geographic colours. Geographic coordinates are approximate centroids from OpenStreetMap / Natural Earth.
Hex values for colours with individual Wikipedia articles or list entries are taken from those sources; for all other entries, values are drawn from the Color-Name Dictionaries. Historical pigments were variable in formulation and the values here are representative, not authoritative. HSV and luminance values are derived from the hex representations. Many of these colour names carry archaic, trade, and colonial-era associations and their inclusion here is merely documentary. Colours are grouped into five types: city, region, country, water body, and pigment & earth source. Where multiple colours share a location, map markers are offset to avoid symbol overlap.