How Do You Pronounce oklch?

There’s a new color specification kid on the CSS block: oklch. In a nutshell it’s a better version of HSL (hue/saturation/lightness) that keeps the perceived lightness of colors consistent as you rotate hues.

It’s a pretty sweet upgrade to the CSS color specification that got adopted and implemented in all major browsers (poor people stuck on IE 11) super quickly. You can even see it in action on this page with the color accent selector in the nav bar which sets a top level css variable with the hue, then all styles can cue off it with simple rules like:

  background-color: oklch(0.40 0.047 var(--hue));

There’s a bunch of good articles describing it in detail so I won’t rehash any of those, but as I was recently became more familiar with it as I was upgrading my site I kept wondering: How the heck do you say oklch out loud?

The more familiar css color types are easy with hex and RGB (arr gee bee) but we’re missing a few vowels to say “oklch” all together and saying all the letters individually “oh kay el see ache” is too much of a mouthful.

Everything I’ve read on it including the intro post by the author, the mdn article, and the spec are silent on how to actually talk to someone out loud about it.

So if no one is going to come up with an easy way to say this I will:

OK Lunch#

You only need to add a couple letters to make it pronounceable and easy to remember. Let’s see if it sticks like bologna.

Lemme know in the (newly upgraded from Disqus to Remark42) comments if I’m full of it!