Earth Colours maps 237 named colours rooted in place. Search, filter and sort the table; click a row or marker to see the colour on the map.
Names point to place in different ways: a city’s trade (Bordeaux, Delft Blue), an event (Magenta, an 1859 battle), a landscape (Blue Danube), or a pigment source (Sienna clays, Lapis Lazuli from Badakhshan).
Switch basemap with the layers button on the map. Download saves the table (CSV or PDF) or the map (interactive HTML, or a PDF of the current view with its legend).
Add colours with + on a row or the map panel; drag to reorder. With 2+ colours, a CIELAB ramp (3–11 classes) is built for sequential or diverging schemes. Export as CSV, PNG, QGIS XML or CSS.
Colours with a Wikipedia article or an entry in the Wikipedia list of colors use that value; in a few cases where Wikipedia gives only a modern web (CSS/X11) value, a traditional value is used instead. All other colours come from three dictionaries digitised in Jaffer’s Color-Name Dictionaries: Maerz & Paul, A Dictionary of Color (1930); Ridgway, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912); and the Plochere Color System (1948), mapped to the 267 NBS/ISCC centroids (Kelly & Judd, 1976). Coordinates are approximate.
Historical pigments varied, so values are representative, not authoritative. HSV and luminance are derived from hex. Many names carry trade and colonial-era associations and are included as documentary record. Markers sharing a location are offset. Basemaps: OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles (OpenStreetMap data), Esri, OpenTopoMap.