June 2016

Yesterday, I was looking at the formatting options for a graphing package and noticed an option to use named colors "from the xkcd survey."

That was a new thing to me. As it turns out, the author of the xkcd.com comics created an online survey of color names about five years ago and over 200,000 users contributed; discussion of results here. It's pretty funny and it's also real science. Because color names are weird.

You can also look at a list sorted alphabetically by name which reveals some rather interesting properties of the set.