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Color Middle Names

80 middle names that name an actual shade — the obvious ones like Scarlett, Hazel and Indigo, and the older ones that have quietly meant a colour in Latin, Irish or Welsh for a thousand years.

Colour names split into two families, and the second is much larger than most parents realise. The first is the plain-English group, where the name is the shade: Scarlett is a bright red (from the medieval cloth, and the surname originally meant a dyer of it), Indigo is the deep blue-violet of the dye plant, Sienna is the burnt orange-brown of an earth pigment from Siena in Tuscany, Saffron is the orange-yellow of the crocus stigma, Slate is blue-grey, Amber is fossil resin the colour of dark honey, Jade is green, Umber is a dull brown, Cerise is cherry-pink, Teal is the blue-green of the duck's head stripe, and Sable, historically, is black. The second family hides the colour inside an ordinary name: Rufus is Latin for red-haired, Flavia is Latin for golden-yellow, Alba is Latin for white, Melanie is Greek for black, Xanthe is Greek for yellow, Bianca and Blanche are Italian and French for white, Rory and Roy both descend from Gaelic ruadh, red, Ciara and Ciaran from ciar, dark, Donovan is often given as dark-brown, Duncan carries donn, brown, Boyd carries buidhe, yellow, Gwyn and Gwen are Welsh for white or fair, Lloyd is Welsh llwyd, grey, and Fiona and Fionn come from Gaelic fionn, fair.

Two of these deserve a note before you use them. Auburn now means a reddish-brown, but it descends from Latin alburnus, whitish — the meaning flipped in English somewhere around the sixteenth century, probably through the spelling "abrun." And Blake is a genuine curiosity: it comes from two Old English words that were nearly identical, blac (pale) and blaec (black), so the surname has meant both light and dark depending on which family carried it. If someone tells you Blake definitively means one of them, they are guessing. In pairing terms, colour names are word names, so they take a plain first name best: Eleanor Sage, Theodore Slate, June Marigold. Two rules hold up almost every time. Do not use two colours — Ruby Scarlett, Violet Lilac and Jade Olive are palettes, not names. And check the colour against your surname for an accidental phrase: Amber Waves, Jet Black, Roan Fields and Sage Green all exist as real full names and all of them will be repeated back with a smile. The middle slot forgives a bold shade far more than the first does, which is exactly why Cobalt, Umber and Cerise belong here rather than at the front.

Top picks, annotated

Here is the shade behind every name on the two lists. Reds and pinks: Cerise (cherry), Coral, Poppy, Rosa, Ruby, Rory, Roy and Rufus (red-haired), Russell (from Old French rous, red-haired), Reid (Old English read, red-haired), Roan (the red-brown of a horse's coat), Sorrel (a light chestnut, also the plant), Russet (a coarse reddish-brown cloth), Jasper (the mineral, most often brick-red) and Rowan (Irish ruadhan, little red one, and a tree with red berries). Yellows, golds and oranges: Aurelia and Golda (gold), Flavia and Xanthe (yellow), Boyd (fair-haired), Topaz, Ginger, Marigold and Clementine. Greens: Emerald, Olive, Sage (a grey-green), Teal, plus Forrest and Hunter, both of which name a dark green because the shade was named after the word. Blues and purples: Azure, Cobalt, Navy, Blue, Cyan, Lavender, Lilac, Violet, Mauve, Amethyst and Celeste, which is Italian for sky-blue. Whites and greys: Alba, Bianca, Blanche, Ivory, Gwen and Gwyn (white), Whit (white), Fiona, Fionn and Finley (fair), Ash, Silver, Sterling, Flint and Lloyd (grey). Blacks and browns: Jet, Onyx, Sable, Umber, Cole (Old English col, coal), Corbin (from the French for raven), Ciara and Ciaran (Irish ciar, dark), Melanie (Greek melas, black), Bay (a dark brown horse), Bruno (brown), and Duncan and Donovan, both carrying Gaelic words for brown.

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Pairing rule: one visible colour per name, and put it in the middle rather than the front. A hidden colour can sit anywhere — nobody hears Rufus, Melanie or Lloyd as a shade — but two out-loud colours in a row turn the whole name into a swatch card. If you want more than one, take the loud shade for the middle and let the quiet Latin or Gaelic one carry the first.

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Adjacent styles: nature middle names, which shares Sage, Olive and half the greens, modern for the word-name habit generally, cool for Slate, Jet and Onyx, and unique for the same distinctiveness by another route. The Gaelic entries make more sense alongside Irish origin names. Then see how to choose a middle name, or return to all 22 styles.