LEGO colour names and their BrickLink names

What this is

Every colour Rebrickable has catalogued, 273 of them, with the name LEGO gives it, the name BrickLink gives it, and the number each of four catalogues uses for it. 76 are in production. The other 197 are retired, and still turn up in old sets, old instructions and old listings, which is where a lookup is needed most.

The two vocabularies are different languages for the same bricks. If you have a LEGO name, from Pick a Brick, an inventory or a set’s parts list, and need the BrickLink name to buy the piece, or the other way round, this is the table. Our 1×1 plate colours page answers a narrower question, which colours a mosaic can actually be bought in; this one is every colour, full stop.

Two names for every colour

LEGO’s colour names are the company’s own design vocabulary. The basic saturated colours are “Bright”: Bright Red, Bright Blue, Bright Yellow. The darks are “Earth”: Earth Blue, Earth Green. The greys are stone: Medium Stone Grey, Dark Stone Grey. Tan is Brick Yellow, Dark Tan is Sand Yellow, and Lime is Br. Yellowish Green, abbreviated exactly like that in LEGO’s own data.

BrickLink’s names were given by collectors describing the bricks in front of them, so Red, Blue, Yellow, Dark Blue, Light Bluish Gray and Tan. They are the names sellers list under and the ones most people know. Rebrickable’s names are BrickLink’s with a handful of exceptions, listed further down.

Of the 172 colours that carry both names, 39 have the same one. These are the 20 most used colours in production, by how many sets they have ever appeared in:

The same name, a different colour

The dangerous cases are not the names that differ but the names that match the wrong colour. Seven LEGO names are BrickLink’s name for a different colour:

Dark Green is the one that catches people. LEGO’s Dark Green is the ordinary green of trees and baseplates, which BrickLink calls Green. BrickLink’s Dark Green is the deep bottle green LEGO calls Earth Green. Both are in production, so an order placed on the name alone gets the wrong colour, with no error message.

Four numbers for one colour

Each catalogue numbers colours its own way and none agrees with another. Black is 0 to Rebrickable, 11 to BrickLink, 26 to LEGO and 0 to LDraw. The table carries all four. Use BrickLink’s to buy, since a wanted list identifies a colour by it; LEGO’s to read anything from the parts-focused end of the hobby; LDraw’s in Studio and other digital building tools; and Rebrickable’s with their data.

LEGO’s own numbering has history in it. Five current colours carry a second LEGO ID from a renumbering or a reformulation: Black is 26 and also 342, Dark Blue is 140 and also 428, Medium Azure is 322 and also 491, Metallic Gold is 335 and also 299 and Metallic Silver is 336 and also 298. The table shows both.

Names move

BrickLink renames colours. Between 2026-08-05, when this table’s IDs were taken from Rebrickable’s API, and 2026-10-18, when the names were read from BrickLink’s colour guide, ten of them changed: Dark Blue-Violet became Dark Royal Blue, Trans-Black became Trans-Brown, Speckle Black-Copper became Speckle Copper, Speckle Black-Silver became Speckle Silver, Speckle Black-Gold became Speckle Gold, Glow in Dark White became Glow In Dark White, Trans Light Orange became Trans-Light Orange, Satin White became Satin Trans-Clear, Satin Trans-Black became Satin Trans-Brown and Trans-Black (2023) became Trans-Black. The IDs did not move, which is why the IDs are the join here and the names are read fresh.

Two of those renames are a swap. Trans-Black, the old name of the smoky colour now called Trans-Brown, has passed to the colour that was Trans-Black (2023). An old listing and a new one can use the same name for different colours.

Rebrickable and BrickLink also differ on 12 current names. Rebrickable’s first: Warm Tan is Medium Tan, Vibrant Yellow is Neon Yellow, Pearl Titanium is Pearl Dark Gray, Sienna Brown is Sienna and Umber Brown is Umber, and every Opal Trans- colour, seven of them, is a Satin Trans- colour on BrickLink.

Why not match by colour value

Each catalogue publishes its own swatch for a colour, and they do not agree. Over the 58 opaque colours in production, BrickLink’s swatch sits a median 38 sRGB steps from Rebrickable’s, and 189 for Chrome Gold. LDraw’s sits a median 30 away, and 131 for Blue Violet. A nearest-colour match across catalogues lands on a different colour often enough to be useless, which is why this table is joined on IDs the catalogues state themselves rather than inferred from colour.

The full list

All 273 colours Rebrickable catalogues, 76 of them in production, in order of their BrickLink name. "Made" is the first and last year a set used the colour, and "Sets" how many sets have, all time. An empty ID means that catalogue has no entry, never 0.

Download the data

Both files carry the same rows as the table above.

• JSON, with the sources, the licence and the list of BrickLink renames stated in the file itself
• CSV, one row per colour, with every name and ID as its own column

Licensed CC BY 4.0 like the source it derives from. Credit Rebrickable, whose public data dumps make this possible, and LDraw, whose colour definitions supply the LDraw codes.

An empty ID means that catalogue has no entry for the colour. It is left blank rather than set to zero, because 0 is a real colour in three of the four numberings.

Limitations

BrickLink’s names are as its colour guide read them on 2026-10-18, and BrickLink renames colours. The IDs are stable, so an ID is the thing to cite.

LEGO’s names are as Rebrickable’s API records them, abbreviations and all: “Br. Yellowish Green”, “Tr. Lg Blue”. They are not expanded here, because the expansion would be a guess.

58 colours have no BrickLink ID, 31 of them the 1:87 scale vehicle colours of the 1960s. LDraw codes are joined on LEGO ID and cover 178 colours; a colour LDraw has no entry for, or that it lists under two codes, is left blank.

“Made” is the first and last year a catalogued set used the colour, which is not quite a production record: Rebrickable catalogues sets ahead of release, so a current colour’s last year can read as next year, and a colour used only in a promotional item may show no sets at all.