The Legend of Green

#558844

A green that is muted. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#558844

RGB

85, 136, 68

OKLCh

57.4% 0.113 138.3°

CIELAB (D50)

51.9, -28.0, 30.6

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 3 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 63% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 68.9; on black, Lc -32.8. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 13.2 and 12.9 and 46.6 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

4.21:1 — large text only

Black text

4.99:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at4.99:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#50833f 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

#558844

protanopia

#838344 · ΔE00 13.2

deuteranopia

#7c7c46 · ΔE00 12.9

tritanopia

#7272c0 · ΔE00 46.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isShepherd’s Green at ΔE00 1.344: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

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