Update: Hey everyone! Thank you so much for your support of my color thesaurus. I’ve gotten tons of wonderful emails from writers, designers, and educators who all love the thesaurus and want one in their own home. After so many requests, I’m excited to announce I’m currently working on a poster version of the color thesaurus. Woot! Woot!

If you’d like to be updated on when the poster is available please sign up here:

Ingrid’s Totally Awesome Color Thesaurus Group

Original Post:

I love to collect words. Making word lists can help to find the voice of my story, dig into the emotion of a scene, or create variety.

One of my on-going word collections is of colors. I love to stop in the paint section of a hardware store and find new names for red or white or yellow. Having a variety of color names at my fingertips helps me to create specificity in my writing. I can paint a more evocative image in my reader’s mind if I describe a character’s hair as the color of rust or carrot-squash, rather than red.

So for fun, I created this color thesaurus for your reference. Of course, there are plenty more color names in the world, so, this is just to get you started.

Fill your stories with a rainbow of images!

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Tags: Creating evocative images, Figurative Language, Imagery, Language