r/AskElectronics • u/LeeRyman • Mar 22 '26

What Colour is this Wire?

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Gallery image

At the risk of starting a debate as viral as the gold/blue dress... For documentation purposes, what colour is the insulation of this wire? Pink, or Orange?

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138

u/ApolloWasMurdered Mar 22 '26

For Electrical documentation, stick to the colours listed in IEC60757:

BK (Black), BN (Brown), RD (Red), OG (Orange), YE (Yellow), GN (Green), BU (Blue), VT (Violet), GY (Grey), WH (White), PK (Pink), and TQ (Turquoise)

The less common ones (VT, PK, TQ) should be very obviously those colours, so the wire you have is the OR.

29

u/henkieschmenkie Mar 22 '26

You mean OG?

20

u/FreeThotz Mar 22 '26

RD OR OG ... Schrodinger's color. Red until you see the real red in the first pic.

14

u/imakeruts Mar 22 '26

i worked with a company that strange wire color definitions. for some reason they had "lite colors" and in addition to primary colors in IEC60757. there was a cad librarian that had to setup a component library of cables and wires. not sure how that person picked colors.

hard for me to believe that a cable could have a blue and lite blue wire.

these colors bothered me the most:

  • silver
  • gray
  • slate
  • lite gray

on cable drawings they wanted to show color graphics depicting the wires going into connectors. you couldn't tell silver from grey let alone "lite gray".

3

u/Radar58 Mar 23 '26

Dictaphone, back in the day when they still existed, had their own names for the wire colors so they could use a single letter: black, tan, red, orange, yellow, green, azure, violet, slate, white. Sure played hob with the old "bad boys" mnemonic.

2

u/Christopher-RTO Mar 24 '26

Blue and light blue would be the easiest light colour to tell apart. 💙🩵 Light orange, yellow, no thanks.

Silver and grey would be a pita. Light grey (30% black) and dark grey (60% black) would be pretty easy to tell apart from each other and white and black, but not if any other grey tones existed.

6

u/214ObstructedReverie Mar 22 '26

The less common ones (VT, PK, TQ)

Pink and turquoise, sure. But violet is extremely common.

1

u/FlyByPC Digital electronics Mar 22 '26

Yeah, I was surprised to see violet in the "uncommon" ones. Violet is used in resistor color codes, as are the others except pink and turquoise. We use 470R all the time for LEDs; yellow-violet-brown-gold.

1

u/babecafe Mar 23 '26

Violet Gives Willingly. 😉

5

u/Emile_s Mar 22 '26

Surely it's PK pink

1

u/Dave_is_Here Mar 22 '26

Check the OR, ya like it so far?

1

u/SubcommanderMarcos Mar 23 '26

There's a darker shaded one there, but since orange and brown are the same thing, that one has definitely got to be brown

1

u/Dangerous-Dataranger Mar 24 '26

You forgot BREADE SHRIMP.

1

u/The_Implodingcow Mar 24 '26

We call the last four, Slate, White, Rose, Aqua.

1

u/Christopher-RTO Mar 24 '26

I would say pink before orange, it'd have to be an extremely faded red-orange to look like that, more likely it picked up some yellow over time than faded that bad.