On this site, Violet is reserved for the saturated blue-violets that read as neither pure blue nor pure purple — roughly HSL hue 245 to 262. Above about 262 a color tips into Purple; below about 245 it tips into Blue. The color also has to be reasonably saturated and mid-toned: pale, washed-out, or grayed versions of the same hue are filed under their nearer neighbor (Blue or Purple) instead. In practice Violet is the periwinkle-to-iris wedge — think Majorelle Blue or a medium slate blue.

Violet is a spectral hue — it sits at the short-wavelength end of the visible spectrum (around 380 to 450 nm), a single-wavelength color with strong blue and a little red. Purple is not spectral at all: it is the broad family of red-and-blue mixtures the eye reads when long- and short-wavelength cones fire together, with no single wavelength of its own. So violets lean blue and feel "lit from within," while purples span everything from red-leaning plum to deep aubergine.

Violet is the newest shade family on the encyclopedia, added when the catalog grew large enough to separate the true blue-violets from the broader Purple family. The letter pages (A to Z) are being re-audited one at a time and their qualifying blue-violets migrated here, so this page fills in as that pass proceeds. Every color shown has been eyeballed against the hue rule above rather than assigned by name alone.