HueComb

Grey

#808080

A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#808080

RGB

128, 128, 128

OKLCh

60.0% 0.000 89.9°

CIELAB (D50)

53.6, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 18 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it — this part of the space is crowded, and the names here are finer distinctions than most people make.
  • It uses almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 66.9; on black, Lc -34.8. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
  • Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

3.95:1 — large text only

Black text

5.32:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at5.32:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#777777 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.

Try it against your own background

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#808080

protanopia

#808080 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#808080 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#808080 · ΔE00 0.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isTrolley Grey at ΔE00 0.378: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Trolley GreyΔE00 0.378 · #818181
  • Aged Moustache GreyΔE00 0.764 · #7e7e7e
  • Platinum GraniteΔE00 0.825 · #807f7e
  • Pound SterlingΔE00 0.889 · #818081
  • Mt. RushmoreΔE00 1.18 · #7f8181
  • Captain NemoΔE00 1.181 · #828080
  • SquantΔE00 1.197 · #828383
  • Storm CloudΔE00 1.352 · #808283
  • IronsideΔE00 1.489 · #7e8082
  • Grey ToteΔE00 1.706 · #81807d
  • Game OverΔE00 1.722 · #7e8181
  • SharkskinΔE00 1.74 · #808184

10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.