Colour namer

A colour namer is a systematic algorithm to convert colours to colour names. A colour name is a name describing a colour.

There are a variety of ways to do this. Many colour namers find the nearest colour in a large colour list and use the colour name associated with it, but it might be more logical to convert the colour to HSV and assign hue, saturation, and value names to it.

HSV color naming

Using HSV to name colours works well.

• colour name 1 has 10 hues, 4 shades, and 5 greys, for a total of 10×4+5 (45 colour names).
• colour name 2 has 24 hues, 10 shades, and 9 greys, for a total of 24×10+9 (249 colour names).
• colour name 7 has 48 hues, 36 shades, 17 greys, and 10 Lerma, for a total of 48×36+17+10 (1755 colour names).
• colour name 8 has 96 hues, 136 shades, and 33 greys, for a total of 96*136+33 (13089 colour names).

The next precision doubling would theoretically have 192 hues, 528 shades, and 65 greys, but it would be impractical to find so many names, so it is conjectured that colour name 8 is the final colour namer.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/511146301/ for a demo of colour name 1, colour name 2, and colour name 7.

Here is a graph of all colour names used by colour name 1:

Here is a graph of all colour names used by colour name 2:

Note: When rounding halfway hues, saturations and values, both round halfway values up, but colour name 1 rounds the hue towards red, green or blue and rounds the saturation up, while colour name 2 (as well as colour name 3 and up, including colour name 7) and colour name 8 rounds the hue towards yellow, cyan or magenta and rounds the saturation down. This is important for correct implementation of those methods.

colour name 3, colour name 4, colour name 5, and colour name 6 are incomplete versions of colour name 7.

This scheme is created by combining a hue name list, a saturation+value name list and a greyscale name list.