What is the difference between auburn and chestnut?

What the one published auburn shows

Auburn has no CSS keyword and no Colourwise colour profile, so its only published anchor is the crowd survey's #9a3001, with OKLCH chroma 0.149 and hue about 39°. The survey's chestnut has chroma 0.116 and hue about 42°: nearly the same hue, less colourful, and darker. The lexicon draws auburn inside chestnut's hue band but shifted to higher chroma, and the catalogue's chestnut swatch falls inside auburn's region as well. The crowd's auburn also falls inside Rust, Auburn — the red-brown corner of English is crowded with overlapping words.

The word that changed colour

Auburn comes, through Old French, from Medieval Latin alburnus, 'off-white', from Latin albus, 'white'. In early 15th-century English it meant whitish or flaxen. In the 16th century the sense shifted to reddish brown, apparently under the influence of Middle English brun, 'brown', which also changed the word's spelling, and since then it has been used mainly of hair. Chestnut is simpler: the nut, from Latin castanea, and a colour name for dark reddish brown from the 1650s. A word that drifted from pale to red-brown is a reminder that colour names are not stable labels attached to fixed colours.

Why a hair word resists a swatch

Hair is not a flat colour. Each strand is translucent and pigmented differently along its length, a head of hair mixes many strands, and its highlights change with the light and angle, so no single HEX value represents 'auburn hair' any better than one value represents 'gold'. The lexicon's auburn is a region for flat colours — paint, fabric, a graphic — that people describe with the hair word. Colourwise's hair colour pages treat hair as a range of observed colours, not as categories people belong to, and this page makes no judgement about anyone's hair.

Using the words for things other than hair

For wood, leather, horses' coats and paint, chestnut is the ordinary word and is widely understood as a warm, fairly dark red-brown. Auburn applied to a sofa or a paint colour borrows the hair word's glamour and is less precise: it tells you the colour is red-brown and fairly vivid, but not how dark. If you need a vivid red-brown and want it to be read the same way by everyone, 'rust' or 'copper' carry the saturation more reliably; if you need a quieter one, 'chestnut' is safer than 'auburn'.

The data

What goes wrong, and what to do

What the evidence says

Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.

• FactModerate evidence

  Auburn comes from Medieval Latin alburnus, 'off-white'; it meant whitish or flaxen in early 15th-century English, shifted to reddish brown in the 16th century, and has since been used mainly of hair.

  Caveat: Summarised from a compiled etymology reference.

  Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

• Colourwise analysisLimited evidence

  The xkcd survey's auburn (#9a3001) has OKLCH chroma 0.149 against 0.116 for its chestnut (#742802), at a similar hue; the two are 8.0 apart in CIEDE2000.

  Based on: OKLCH and CIEDE2000 computed by Colourwise from the published survey values.

  Caveat: Auburn has only this one published anchor; its region is correspondingly less certain than chestnut's.

  Source: Color survey results, and the rgb.txt list of the 954 most common colour names

• FactModerate evidence

  Chestnut is recorded as the name of a dark reddish-brown colour from the 1650s.

  Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

• Colourwise interpretationModerate evidence

  A single swatch cannot represent a hair colour, because hair's appearance comes from many translucent strands and changing highlights.

  Based on: Follows from hair's structure as a mass of individually pigmented, partly translucent fibres viewed under varying light, which a flat colour sample does not reproduce.

Related questions

Did auburn really once mean a pale colour?

Yes. In early 15th-century English auburn meant whitish or flaxen, from a Latin word for off-white. The shift to red-brown happened in the 16th century, helped by its resemblance to 'brown'.

Is auburn closer to red or to brown?

In the lexicon it sits in the brown family at a hue of 30°–45°, the same band as chestnut and rust, but with higher chroma, so it reads as a red-brown rather than a red.

Is chestnut the same as mahogany?

No. Mahogany is darker and lower in chroma: the catalogue mahogany is a deep, subdued red-brown, while chestnut is a warmer, lighter reddish brown.

Related topics

Go further

Sources

• Online Etymology Dictionary — Douglas Harper (Reference work)
• Color survey results, and the rgb.txt list of the 954 most common colour names — xkcd (Randall Munroe) (Reference work)
• CSS Color Module Level 4 — W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) (Official standard or government)
• Colourwise editorial synthesis — Colourwise (Colourwise editorial)

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.