50 actual shades of gray

A 1912 book by Robert Ridgway named 1,115 colors, including dozens of shades of gray

Color to your heart's content.
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Robert Ridgway was a famous ornithologist who wrote an eight-volume work on The Birds of North and Middle America. (Three more volumes were completed by a colleague after his death.) He saw a need for standardized color naming in ornithology and other sciences that had to classify large quantities of natural specimens, and published a system for identifying and naming 1,115 colors in 1912.

Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature was not the first attempt to standardize colors. Taxonomies of 100 to 400 color names had been published through the 19th century and more rigorous systems based on spectrum analysis or color-wheel placement had used symbols or numbers to represent exact combinations of color features (hue, tone, light, shade, etc.). Ridgway's, however, was the first to provide such a finely divided color categorization that also used words from natural language, which, he argued, despite their imprecision, were more useful to naturalists.

The book was printed with 1,115 painstakingly produced color plates, including more than 100 shades of gray. The names for those grays include mellifluous terms like plumbeous (the color of lead), plumbago (a flower with lead-colored petals), glaucous (from the Latin/Greek for bluish-gray), vinaceous (wine-colored), cinerous (cinder-colored), and heliotrope (a flower with purplish petals). Varley is named for landscape painter John Varley and Payne after painter William Payne. After you read this list, you can proudly tell all your friends you were intellectually stimulated by reading 50 shades of gray.

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1. Cadet Gray

2. Carbon Gray

3. Castor Gray

4. Cinereous

5. Clear Blue-Green Gray

6. Court Gray

7. Dawn Gray

8. Drab-Gray

9. French Gray

10. Glaucous-Gray

11. Dark Glaucous-Gray

12. Deep Glaucous-Gray

13. Gull Gray

14. Light Gull Gray

15. Hathi Gray

16. Heliotrope-Gray

17. Dark Heliotrope Slate

18. Iron Gray

19. Lavender-Gray

20. Lilac-Gray

21. Mineral Gray

22. Mouse Gray

23. Blackish Mouse Gray

24. Neutral Gray

25. Dusky Neutral Gray

26. Olive-Gray

27. Payne's Gray

28. Light Payne's Gray

29. Pale Payne's Gray

30. Pearl Gray

31. Plumbeous

32. Blackish Plumbeous

33. Plumbeous-Black

34. Dark Plumbeous

35. Plumbago Gray

36. Dark Plumbago Gray

37. Puritan Gray

38. Purplish Gray

39. Pallid Purplish Gray

40. Sky Gray

41. Slate Color

42. Slate-Gray

43. Slate-Black

44. Blackish Slate

45. Smoke Gray

46. Storm Gray

47. Varley's Gray

48. Vinaceous-Gray

49. Deep Vinaceous-Gray

50. Violet-Gray

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.