Find Out What Color Your Favorite Word Is

As a writer, I think a lot about words and the given associations people have with them. Words have an incredible ability to conjure up images, sounds, smells, memories, and colors for people. One software engineer has capitalized on this phenomenon, namely, the relationship between words and color, to develop the "Text to CSS Color" web app that comes up with a specific color based on the words you type in. Is it cool? Yes. Beautiful? Yes, that too. It's that sweet spot where technology and art collide, and believe you me, you're definitely about to spend the rest of your afternoon finding out what colors all your favorite words are.

Text to CSS Color was design by Canadian software engineer and college student Sunjay Varma (cue me bemoaning how everyone making something of themselves is my age or younger, while I'm still unable to do laundry without turning my white t-shirts pink). It's a super clean, blank interface that starts changing color as soon as you start typing words into the prompt box. Once a color starts appearing, the app also provides you with the specific RGB and Hex model codes for the color, which is really cool if you're a color nerd like I am.

If the term "CSS Color" is throwing you off, that's probably because it's a needlessly confusing term for something that really isn't all that confusing in practice. CSS Colors are colors made from the combinations of red, blue and green that are considered "web friendly" — as in, they display nicely on all computers and web platforms. There are more than 16 million of them. And with this app, you can find distinct CSS shades that correspond to certain words — or really just letter combinations, if you're more into gibberish. Beauty in chaos and all that.

Wondering what it looks like? Here are a few examples of the app in use:

1. "Bustle"

Maybe we should consider changing Bustle's color scheme.

2. "Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie"

Narcissism at its finest right here.

3. "Red"

It's weird because it's not actually red. This is true for pretty much all colors, by the way; "blue" is a shade of sage green, "purple" is a weird sort of beige, "yellow" is a delicate lavender, and so on and so forth.

4. "Trap Queen"

I always new that "trap queen" would be a lovely lime green.

5. "On Fleek"

That color is super on fleek.

Curious to see more? Play around with it on your own here. Just, y'know... don't blame me if you end up being utterly unproductive at work for the rest of the day.

Images: Text to CSS Color (5)