Maroon (US/UK, Australia ) is a brownish crimson color that takes its name from the French word marron, or chestnut. "Marron" is also one of the French translations for "brown". Terms describing interchangeable shades, with overlapping RGB ranges, include burgundy, claret, mulberry and crimson. Different dictionaries define maroon differently. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines maroon as a dark reddish-purple color while its "American Dictionary" section defines maroon as dark brown-red. Lexico online dictionary defines maroon as a brownish-red. Similarly, Dictionary.com defines maroon as a dark brownish-red. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary describes maroon as "a brownish-crimson or claret colour," while the Merriam-Webster online dictionary simply defines it as a dark red. In the sRGB color model for additive color representation, the web color called maroon is created by turning down the brightness of pure red to about one half. It is also noted that maroon is the complement of the web color called teal.

Etymology

Maroon is French marron ("chestnut"), itself from the Italian marrone that means both chestnut and brown (but the color maroon in Italian is granata and in French is grenat), from the medieval Greek maraon. The first recorded use of maroon as a color name in English was in 1789.

In culture

Many universities, colleges, high schools and other educational institutions have maroon as one of their school colors. Popular combinations include maroon and white, maroon and grey, maroon and gold, and maroon and blue. Sports teams often use maroon as one of their identifying colors, as a result, many have received the nickname "Maroons."

Commercial variations of maroon

Maroon (Crayola)

The color designated as maroon in Crayola crayons since 1958 (when it was renamed from dark red) is a bright medium shade of maroon halfway between brown and rose.

Rich maroon (maroon (X11))

Displayed in the adjacent table is the color rich maroon, i.e. maroon as defined in the X11 color names, which is much brighter and more toned toward rose than the HTML/CSS maroon shown above. See the chart Color name clashes in the X11 color names article to see those colors that are different in HTML/CSS and X11.

Mystic maroon

Displayed at right is the color mystic maroon, one of the colors in the special set of metallic Crayola crayons called Silver Swirls, the colors of which were formulated by Crayola in 1990. Although this is supposed to be a metallic color, there is no mechanism for displaying metallic colors on a computer.

Dark red

Displayed in the adjacent table is the web color dark red.

UP Maroon

UP Maroon is the shade used by the University of the Philippines as its primary color.