as days pass by

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.

• ace
• add
• ado
• aid
• baa
• bad
• bed
• bee
• bib
• bid
• boa
• bob
• boo
• cab
• cad
• cob
• cod
• coo
• dab
• dad
• deb
• did
• die
• doc
• doe
• ebb
• fad
• fed
• fee
• fib
• fie
• fob
• foe
• ice
• oaf
• odd
• ode
• oof
• off

Addendum addendum: Matthew Somerville points out a few more words, of varying acceptability in formal conversation :) I can only plead that /usr/share/dict/words didn’t contain the better ones in here (IODIDE and BODIED), and reiterate that I’m not including BAE anywhere and I don’t care if you think it’s a word. Also, the CSS Colour Module Level 4 spec dangles the tantalising possibility of eight-hex-digit codes which can include an alpha channel (#rrggbbaa) which would bring the excellent CODIFIED and ACIDIFIC into the list, as well as the increasingly Latinate FABACEAE, IBIDIDAE, and COCCIDAE.

• BABBIE
• BODIED
• DOBBED
• IDEAED
• IODIDE
• FAB
• DIB
• BOD