662 named blues from nine naming systems, 1814 to now, circling the screen's pure blue. Drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, hover or tap a name to see who else named nearly the same colour.
Around the circle is hue, from violet through #0000ff's own hue at the top to green-blue, stretched so the blues fill the full turn. Outward depends on the arrangement: how many naming systems name nearly the same colour (most-named at the centre), lightness (dark at the centre), colour distance from #0000ff, chroma (greyed blues at the centre, vivid at the edge), naming system (one band per system, in rough order of date, oldest inside), or a spiral of lightness nudged outward by agreement.
Threads join every pair of names whose colours lie closer than the chosen CIELAB difference (ΔE). Each thread takes the mix of its two colours and fades toward the night as the pair grows further apart. "Nearly the same" on the card means ΔE under 5. A dot's size grows with the number of systems that name its colour. The outer orbit holds 119 names with no published colour, grouped by kind. Where one of them recurs inside the circle attached to a colour, a dashed thread reaches in to it; the rest stay outside, with no position.
Sources. Werner's Nomenclature (Syme, 1814), Ridgway's Color Standards (1912), Wada's Dictionary of Color Combinations, Le Corbusier's Polychromie, ISCC–NBS (1955), RAL, CSS, the xkcd colour survey (2010) and Many Languages Many Colors, via the open color-name-lists collection. Blues here: CIELAB hue 205–315°, chroma over 10.