This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz
by Stuart Langridge.
Original Post: CSS colour words in hex
Feed Title: as days pass by
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix
Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall
One of the nice little fillips about writing CSS is that occasionally you use a colour code which turns out to be a word; the most famous here is probably #DECADE. I ran across bada55.io which has made a whole site from this and was quite pleased, but the terrible old grammarian in me just can’t deal with the l33tsp34k nature of most of the suggestions. You’re obviously allowed A to F, and I’m prepared to allow 0 as O and 1 as I, but using 5 as an S or 3 as E is dubious, using 1 as an L is exceptionally dubious (especially when it’s already being an I in the same word!), and 7 for T or 4 for A or 6/G or (incomprehensibly) 9/P are right out. The fun nature of the game goes away when you have to puzzle out the meaning of the word like it’s a crossword clue or one of those horrid personalised number plates.
So, if we excise these crimes against spelling, all the colours that make what I consider to be proper words are below. There are obviously rather a lot of pastel shades, since each of the red, green, and blue channels will almost certainly be A0 or larger, but that’s not necessarily a problem (and there are a couple of decent highly-saturated colours in there too; I’m particularly fond of #AC1D1C and plan to use it more often). If we admit white and black into the palette, it’d almost certainly be possible to build a site while drawing solely from this list for your colour choices. Something to bear in mind for a future project, maybe.
abided
acacia
accede
acidic
babied
baobab
beaded
bedded
beefed
bobbed
bodice
boobed
cabbed
cabbie
caddie
cicada
codded
coffee
coifed
dabbed
decade
decide
decode
deeded
deface
defied
deiced
doffed
doodad
eddied
efface
facade
fibbed
fobbed
office
Addendum: I forgot about three-character hex colour codes! Of which there are also quite a few, and we do a lot better at the saturated ones this time because a whole channel is quite often 0 or 1. Although it’s less lexicographically elegant to use a three-character word.