lexadecimal morphs web colours into definitions

I LOVE things that are as clever, and light, and charming as http://lexadecimal.com. Based on Ben Griffiths original observation that hexcodes (how colour is written in html code) often made actual words with actual meanings - the lexadecimal team have taken that to a delightful conclusion and given a wall of colours with definitive meanings! And it's totally cute.

The words are drawn from the British section of Google's Ngram database , meaning they are words which have appeared in books published in Great Britain. They therefore include proper nouns (Bessel, a German astronomer), foreign words ('ecoles'), and some words whose meaning is not immediately clear ('sallal').

When widening our search for hex codes with meaning, we made three substitutions: '1' for 'l', '5' for 's' and '0' for 'o', meaning that all the colours on Lexadecimal are those whose codes can be formed 6-letter words comprising the letters 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'l', and 's'. Thanks again to Ben Griffiths, whose semantic web colours gave us the original idea. Meanings are from dictionary.com .

Lexadecimal was created by Jonny Richards, Peter MacRobert, David Somers & Amanda Dredge, with a nod to Ben Griffiths for the original concept.