Color Wheel Spinner

The color wheel spinner is a random color picker: twelve colors are already on the wheel, each sector filled with its own color and labelled in black or white, whichever reads better on it, so the answer is visible the moment the wheel stops.

Which colors are on the wheel

The eleven basic color words of English — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, black, white and gray, the set described by the linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms (1969) — plus turquoise to make an even twelve. They are arranged so that no two similar colors sit side by side. Each color appears once, so each has a 1 in 12 chance — 8.33%. This is a spinner that picks a color, not the artist's color wheel that shows how hues relate to one another.

Ways people use a color spinner

• Floor and party games: spin for the color of the circle, card or balloon the next player has to reach.
• Art challenge: spin, then paint or draw something using only that color and its shades.
• Learning colors: small children call out the color the wheel lands on, then find something in the room that matches.
• Team colors: switch on "Remove the winner" and spin once per team, so no two teams share a color.
• Outfit of the day: spin for the color you have to wear somewhere today.

Adding or removing colors

Delete any line and that color leaves the wheel — keep only red, yellow, green and blue and each has a 25% chance. A color you type in yourself gets a sector from the regular palette, because only the twelve names on the starting list, spelled exactly as they are there with a capital first letter, carry their own paint. Type a color twice and it counts as two entries; the result always reports the real figure.

Getting the 12 colors back

Edits are saved in this browser for this page only, so the color spinner and the plain wheel keep separate lists. "Restore all" puts back the colors that "Remove the winner" took off, and "Restore the preset" replaces any edits with the original twelve. Nothing is uploaded: a shared link carries the entries inside the link itself.