A great many — M is one of the busier letters for color names, thanks to large families like "Medium…", "Maximum…", "Middle…", "Metallic…", "Mustard…", and "Mint…". This page lists 191 notable M-color names, drawn from the CSS named-color list, Crayola, Pantone, the xkcd Color Survey, pigment and dye history, and brand and team palettes. Fifteen CSS named-color keywords start with M — magenta, maroon, mediumaquamarine, mediumblue, mediumorchid, mediumpurple, mediumseagreen, mediumslateblue, mediumspringgreen, mediumturquoise, mediumvioletred, midnightblue, mintcream, mistyrose, and moccasin.

Several stand out. Mauve was the first commercially successful synthetic dye, discovered by William Henry Perkin in 1856, and it kicked off the modern dye industry. Magenta is one of the printing primaries and a CSS named color. Malachite and Maya Blue are historic mineral and pigment colors. And on the Pantone Color of the Year list, M appears twice in recent years: Marsala (2015) and Mocha Mousse (2025).

In 1856 the 18-year-old English chemist William Henry Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine when he produced instead a vivid purple substance that dyed silk beautifully. He patented it as mauveine (mauve), and it became the first synthetic organic dye to be manufactured on an industrial scale. Its commercial success helped create the modern chemical and dye industries and set off a fashion craze for the color in the late 1850s.

Maya Blue is a remarkably durable blue pigment used by the ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures. Unlike most organic blues, it resists fading, acids, and weathering for centuries because it is not a simple dye but a composite — indigo dye bonded to the clay mineral palygorskite. It survives vividly on murals and ceramics at sites such as Chichén Itzá. The hex shown here is a modern digital approximation, not the pigment itself.

Both come from named-color systems rather than everyday speech. The CSS named-color list includes a whole set of "medium" variants — mediumblue, mediumseagreen, mediumslateblue, mediumvioletred, and more — inherited from the older X11 color names. The "Maximum…" and "Middle…" colors come largely from Crayola's educational color sets. Because these families span the spectrum, they are filed here across many shade families by their actual hue.

It varies by source. The fifteen CSS named M-colors (magenta, maroon, the "medium" set, midnightblue, mintcream, mistyrose, moccasin) are fixed exactly by the W3C CSS Color Module specification and render identically in every browser. Pantone references like Marsala (Color of the Year 2015) and Mocha Mousse (PANTONE 17-1230, 2025) are sRGB approximations of physical swatches. University and institutional colors such as MSU Green come from official brand guidelines. For pigment- and dye-named colors (Malachite, Maya Blue, Mauve) and the many xkcd-survey names, the values are widely circulated digital references rather than fixed standards.