
The flight was boring, to say the least. Strapped between two strangers in the middle seat, I had a funny little thought – list out all English words that can make a hexadecimal color code! And what excited me further was checking out the colors those words would “produce”.
I’m sure you already know that hexadecimal color codes, which are 6 characters long, have only A to F letters and 0-9 digits. The first word that came to my mind was facade or to put it in hexadecimal form, #FACADE, which is a lovely shade of pink.
FYI, facade comes from French façade.
Beaded (or #BEADED) and bedded (#BEDDED) followed soon. And then I was stumped.
After several minutes of intense brain racking I just couldn’t come up with additional words. This was getting frustrating especially knowing that I could get the list of English words if I could just open my laptop. But for that I had to prise myself off from the middle, smile at the person sitting in the aisle seat, open the overhead locker, take out my laptop and plant myself back and then start the computer.
“Let’s not be lazy… it’s going to be fun”, I told myself and up I stood.
I knew that, on the Mac, the entire list of words are stored in a file named “words” in the folder “/usr/share/dict”. It was just a matter was writing a small Perl script which would use regular expressions to go through the English words list and dig out all words that are exactly 6 letters and have only a-f letters. This was the ease part.
So here are the words with the corresponding colours.
Color | Hex Code | English Word |
---|---|---|
#ACCEDE | Accede | |
#BACABA | Bacaba | |
#BACCAE | Baccae | |
#BEDEAD | Bedead | |
#BEDEAF | Bedeaf | |
#DECADE | Decade | |
#DEFACE | Deface | |
#EFFACE | Efface |
The list was surprising small. So I had another thought – what if we replace the alphabet O with the digit 0? Will the list of words increase substantially? After all, we were adding one more vowel.
Color | Hex Code | English Word |
---|---|---|
#BA0BAB | Baobab | |
#B0BBED | Bobbed | |
#C0BAEA | Cobaea | |
#C0BBED | Cobbed | |
#C0BCAB | Cobcab | |
#C0FFEA | Coffea | |
#C0FFEE | Coffee | |
#DEC0DE | Decode | |
#D0BBED | Dobbed | |
#D0DDED | Dodded | |
#D00DAB | Doodab | |
#D00DAD | Doodad |
That was a fun-filled exercise. Quite nerdy but, hey, at least I kept myself occupied.
By the way, one can substitute 1 (or 7) with the alphabet I, 2 for Z, 3 for E, 5 for S, 9 for g and other such variations.
Update: Sherri’s comment to this post is brilliant. It never occurred too me that I can also put in 3-letter English word equivalents of the shorthand hexadecimal color codes… and here they are.
Color | Shorthand Hex Code | 3-Letter English Word |
---|---|---|
#ace | Ace | |
#add | Add | |
#baa | Baa | |
#bad | Bad | |
#bae | Bae | |
#bed | Bed | |
#bee | Bee | |
#cab | Cab | |
#cad | Cad | |
#dab | Dab | |
#dad | Dad | |
#ebb | Ebb | |
#fad | Fad | |
#fed | Fed | |
#fee | Fee |
Never noticed that hex can be words like these, I like “Decade” and “Coffee”. Thanks
Hi, Good one. I’m sure there would be tens of 3-letter English words that would translate to the abbreviated 3-letter color codes. Words like like ‘ace’, ‘add’ etc.