Some of them are special (they can be displayed on devices with very low colour depth), some of them are just there for sentimental value (e.g., rebeccapurple),

Some of them are special (they can be displayed on devices with very low colour depth), some of them are just there for sentimental value (e.g., rebeccapurple), but most of them descend from X11's colour list - which itself descends from a mishmash of Crayola colours, Sinclair Paints samples, and whatever Jim Gettys thought was important in this 1985 commit: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~alanc/xc-historical/commit/xc/programs/rgb/rgb.txt?id=0d0ad63237618270e48503a37ce542139d7abab5 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~alanc/xc-historical/commit/xc/...