There are several hundred named colors that start with D across the major catalogs — CSS/W3C, Crayola, Pantone, RAL, Sherwin-Williams, and traditional Japanese, Indian, and European naming traditions. This page currently lists the most widely-recognized of those, deduplicated by hex value. Notably, the letter D has 21 CSS-named colors — more than any other letter — because the CSS named-color set — inherited from the X11/SVG color tradition rather than generated by any darkening rule — carries a "Dark" prefix variant for many of its other named colors (DarkBlue, DarkCyan, DarkGoldenrod, DarkGray, DarkGreen, DarkKhaki, DarkMagenta, DarkOliveGreen, DarkOrange, DarkOrchid, DarkRed, DarkSalmon, DarkSeaGreen, DarkSlateBlue, DarkSlateGray, DarkTurquoise, DarkViolet, DeepPink, DeepSkyBlue, DimGray, DodgerBlue), or 24 CSS keywords if the gray/grey aliases are counted separately.

A few claim the title. Dodger Blue is one of the most distinctive CSS named colors, named after the Los Angeles (originally Brooklyn) Dodgers baseball team. Dark Red and Dark Blue are foundational CSS named colors used across countless websites. Dartmouth Green and the Duke Navy / Duke Royal Blue pair are prominent university identity colors. And Dandelion is one of Crayola’s most-discussed retired colors — its 2017 retirement was announced at a Crayola event in Times Square; Crayola later cited fan campaigns and social-media requests in its 2025 limited-edition revival, the first time in Crayola’s 122-year history that the company brought a retired color back.

This is one of the most-quoted quirks of the CSS named color list. The CSS named colors were inherited from the X11 color set (1989), which had its own conventions and didn't always match later expectations. In the X11 system, darkgray was named relative to a different baseline; gray itself was added separately at a darker midpoint (#808080) when the official HTML 4 / CSS 1 color list was being assembled. By the time the inconsistency was noticed, both names were already widely used in the wild, so the CSS spec kept them both — meaning darkgray #A9A9A9 is officially lighter than gray #808080 in every modern browser, forever. The same X11-inheritance quirk leaves darksalmon (#E9967A) appearing lighter than salmon (#FA8072), and darkseagreen (#8FBC8F) being lighter than typical "dark" expectations.

Dandelion was introduced in 1990 as one of eight new Crayola colors (alongside Cerulean, Fuchsia, Jungle Green, Royal Purple, Teal Blue, Vivid Tangerine, and Wild Strawberry) that replaced the eight colors Crayola retired that same year — the first time in the company’s history that any color had been retired. Dandelion became a beloved everyday yellow in the standard 24-count box. On 31 March 2017 (National Crayon Day), Crayola announced at a Times Square event that Dandelion was being retired to make room for “Bluetiful,” a vivid blue inspired by the newly-discovered YInMn pigment — the first new inorganic blue pigment in roughly 200 years, discovered accidentally in 2009 in the lab of chemistry professor Mas Subramanian at Oregon State University. (Crayola has noted publicly that the Bluetiful crayon uses kid-safe wax-crayon ingredients to mimic the YInMn color; it is not made of YInMn itself.) Retired Dandelion remained a fan favorite, with the color earning what Crayola later described as “notoriety,” collector interest, and social-media campaigns calling for its return. On 5 February 2025, Crayola announced that — for the first time in the company’s 122-year history — it was bringing back eight retired colors (including Dandelion) as a limited-edition collection; Crayola now lists Dandelion as available again in the standard 24-count and 64-count crayon boxes.

Davy's Gray is a soft slate-gray watercolor pigment, traditionally associated with powdered slate. It was developed by Winsor & Newton — the British artist-materials maker founded in 1832 — for an English watercolorist named Henry Davy (1793–1865), who studied under John Sell Cotman of the Norwich School of landscape painters. Davy used the pigment for atmospheric effects in his watercolors (overcast skies, distant stonework, slate roofs) where pure black or pure neutral gray would have felt too harsh. Winsor & Newton still sells “Davy's Gray” in its Professional Watercolour, Oil, and Acrylic ranges today. The current Professional Watercolour Davy's Gray (Colour No. 217, Series 1) is a multi-pigment formulation listed as PBk19 / PBk6 / PG17 / PW5 — where PBk19 is “Slate Gray,” a semi-opaque inorganic pigment produced from powdered slate, so the current formulation still contains slate as one of its components. Exact formulations vary across manufacturers and across W&N’s own oil and acrylic ranges.

For the 21 CSS-named D-colors (DarkBlue, DarkCyan, DarkGoldenrod, DarkGray/Grey, DarkGreen, DarkKhaki, DarkMagenta, DarkOliveGreen, DarkOrange, DarkOrchid, DarkRed, DarkSalmon, DarkSeaGreen, DarkSlateBlue, DarkSlateGray/Grey, DarkTurquoise, DarkViolet, DeepPink, DeepSkyBlue, DimGray/Grey, DodgerBlue), yes — the W3C CSS Color Module specification fixes the exact sRGB values. (One caveat: CSS deepskyblue is #00BFFF, which on this site shares its hex with Capri; because entries are deduplicated by hex value it is catalogued under that name on the C-page, while the “Deep Sky Blue” row on this page is a separate community variant, #0D75F8.) For Pantone, RAL, and Crayola, hex values are approximate conversions from those brands' proprietary swatch books, which are defined under specific lighting conditions. For university brand colors (Dartmouth Green, Duke Navy Blue, Duke Royal Blue), the authoritative reference is each institution's own brand guide; this page uses those institutional values where verifiable. Where popular databases diverge from official guidelines, both values appear: for example Duke is cataloged here as both Duke Blue #00009C (the historical Wikipedia value) and Duke Navy Blue #012169 (Duke’s current official primary brand color). Similarly Debian is cataloged as Debian Red #D70A53 (community/wiki conversion) and Debian Rubine Red #CE0058 (the current Pantone-derived equivalent published on Debian’s official logos page).