When I was growing up, color names always frustrated me. For example, Oxford defines “ecru” as “the light beige color of unbleached linen.” But what does that look like? I didn’t want the dictionary to tell me. I wanted it to show me.
When I was preparing to do a new word set for Hangman Challenge, my friend Paula Mason suggested several colors to add to the set. This inspired me to create a word set consisting of nothing but colors. But I wouldn’t just have definitions for each color – I would show a sample of each color instead. Finally I would have the guide I always wanted as a kid.
The resulting Colors set contains more than 200 colors. 170 of the colors come from the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS standard. Colors for this word set were also suggested by Paula Mason, Richard Goldman, Kimberly McKinnis, David Preston, Gigi Schofield, Ernie Morgenstern, Pat Ellard, Lenny Galatioto, Anna Warren Cebrian, and Jeff Sensabaugh.
Wikipedia’s List of Colors article was very helpful for some of the colors that are not part of the CSS standard, although I sometimes deviated from their suggested RGB values.
Special thanks to Pat Ellard, who beta-tested an early version of the Colors word set on her iPad and provided several pages of written feedback.
The Colors word set is avaialable for free as part of Hangman Challenge 1.3. Please click the following link to get Hangman Challenge from the Apple App Store.
- Michael Patrick Ellard
