Colour

The Dictionary reads a tartan's colours on three levels. Two are named vocabularies a person reads cloth in — the six base roles every sett reduces to, and the wider human palette of colours people have a word for. Beneath both lies the fine grid: colour space itself sampled evenly at cloth resolution, the reference frame every named colour and every supplier's dye is anchored to.

The six-colour palette

W WhiteR RedY YellowB BlueG GreenK Black

Six roles — white, black, red, green, yellow, blue — are enough to tell apart the patterns the dyers actually distinguished. They are not a designer's choice but a statistical one: fewer would collapse setts that differ on the loom, more would split shades no weaver treated as different roles. Every tartan in the Dictionary is encoded against them.

The human palette

M MagentaR RedO OrangeY YellowG GreenB BlueT TealP PurpleK BlackN GreyW White

Where the six are the roles a loom distinguishes, the human palette is the colours a person has a word for. Its mid tier — the swatches above, the larger dots in the wheels at the top — is the eleven basic colour terms every language settles on (Berlin and Kay's universal set), with two extra between-hues, teal and magenta, where the eye wants a name. Light and dark relatives complete it: a dark red is maroon, a dark blue navy, a light blue sky — twenty-five named colours in all, each snapped to a grid point.

See the palette — the human palette →

The fine grid

Beneath the names is the reference frame: the OKLab colour space sampled evenly at cloth resolution — a few thousand colours, each one perceptual step from its neighbours, every named colour and every supplier's dye within a step of one of them. Each grid point has an address — level, ring, hue — and that address is what ties a name back to a measurable colour.

Every palette below is plotted the same way — over the grid, in three lightness layers, with the human palette beneath it as small dots — so you can see exactly how its colours land among the names and how far they reach toward the dyeable limit.

Reference palettes

Palettes that define colours rather than dye them: the Tartan Register's standard shade list, Logan's 1831 colour vocabulary, and the Dictionary's own role centroids. Each is arranged as a wheel — an achromatic spine from white down to black, hue families round the ring, each a ladder from light to dark.

Human Palette (extended)

Logan (The Scottish Gael, 1831)

Tartan Dictionary

Tartan Register

Supplier palettes

The mill shade cards — the actual dyed yarns a weaver orders against, captured as they are published. The in-browser weaver navigates a palette one jog at a time — lighter or darker along a ladder, or round the ring at the same lightness — so a tartan's colours can be varied a fraction and the effect seen at once.