In the early days of the web, only 256 colors were available. From these, an informal list of 216 “web safe” colors were determined to be supported by all major browsers. And of those, even fewer colors were given color names. Some of these colors include the basics like “Red”, “Green “, “Blue”, Black”, and “White”, but the list goes on to more unique names like “SpringGreen”, “Salmon”, “Tomato”, “AntiqueWhite”, and “AliceBlue”.

These color names can still be used today. However, while words may be more obvious or easier to understand than numerical values to represent color, these words would restrict you to 140 choices. In present day, the web allows the use of over 16 million colors. So basically, yes, designers can use words to choose their colors, but hexadecimal, RGBA and HSLA will provide a superior color selection to contribute to more refined webpage designs.