Official and Traditional Colors of Washington

Washington's state flag stands alone among U.S. state flags as the only one to feature a green field as its primary background color. This extraordinary distinction directly establishes green as Washington's most definitive official color. The green field, established by the 1923 state flag legislation (Chapter 77, Laws of 1923), reflects Washington's identity as the Evergreen State — a nickname that captures Washington's year-round green character — Pacific rainfall keeps the western landscape verdant through all four seasons, well beyond the evergreen forests alone. The gold seal of George Washington centered on this green field creates the green-and-gold pairing that serves as Washington's de facto official color identity.

Washington's two flagship public universities both incorporate gold into their official colors, reinforcing the color's statewide institutional presence. The University of Washington uses purple and gold as its official colors — the purple an institutional choice, the gold reinforcing the state's traditional gold identity. Washington State University uses crimson and gray as its official colors, a divergence from the gold tradition, though the Cougars' rivalry with the purple-and-gold Huskies ensures that gold remains the dominant university color in Washington's public consciousness. The University of Washington's consistent use of gold across its prominent athletics programs — including Pac-12 football and basketball — makes UW's gold the most visible institutional gold in the state.

Washington's Evergreen State nickname is one of the most literally accurate state nicknames in the American system. The western slopes of the Cascades and the Olympic Peninsula receive between 60 and 140 inches of precipitation annually, supporting temperate rainforests of Sitka spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir, and western hemlock that remain intensely green through every month of the year. The Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, one of the largest temperate rainforests in the Western Hemisphere, presents an unbroken canopy of old-growth green that represents the extreme of Washington's forest heritage. Washington's 22 million acres of forest — managed across the Olympic and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forests, the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest — make green the state's most ecologically essential color identity, which aligns with the Evergreen State nickname story.

Gold in Washington's color identity has three distinct sources. The most visible is the state seal's portrait of George Washington, rendered in a gold medallion format that makes the gold emblem the central image of the state's only green state flag. Washington is the only state named after a U.S. president, and the gold of Washington's portrait on the seal links the state's color to its founding honoree. The second source is the Palouse, the rolling agricultural region of southeastern Washington that produces approximately 100 million bushels of soft white wheat annually — more than any other region of equivalent size in the nation — turning the landscape a brilliant gold from July through August. The third is the legacy of Washington's timber industry, which made the state one of the wealthiest in the early twentieth century from the harvest of the same forests whose green defines the western landscape.