What's the opposite of the color chartreuse? How would you describe fuchsia?

Everyone talks about color differently. We often use different names to describe the same color, and we have different ideas of how the color crimson, say, relates to the color red.

Researchers are creating a natural language for color. The goal: To provide a more intuitive way for graphic designers, photographers, artists -- and the rest of us – describe and use color.

To do this, they've put together the one of the world's largest databases ever of color names, collected from some 25,000 queries posted (so far) to the online color thesaurus.

The thesaurus works much like the familiar word thesaurus: Type in a color name – say, "goldenrod" – and the thesaurus returns an image of the color you requested, images of the four shades similar to yours, plus each color's numerical representation known as its RGB (Red, Green, Blue) code.

The thesaurus also returns color antonyms – those on the opposite end of the color wheel. (In the case of goldenrod, these are shades of blue.)

Besides being a useful alternative to proprietary color-naming systems, the color thesaurus also can be mined for valuable data about our interests in color.

With data from the thesaurus, researchers compiled a color "zeitgeist," in which lexical clouds represent the popularity of specific colors. The bigger the text, the more people searched for that color name relative to the other listed color names in that lexical cloud.

The tool loads with the most commonly queried color names. To see less common color name searches, simply click radio buttons to the right above the lexical cloud.