https://www.tartandictionary.org/tags/nearest-tartans/Recent content in Nearest Tartans on Tartan DictionaryHugoenMon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/deltatartan/Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/deltatartan/<p>Every cloth page in the Dictionary carries a <strong>nearest tartans</strong> table: the most similar cloths in the whole corpus, each with a number in the ΔTartan column. This post explains what that number measures — why a faded, two-hundred-year-old kilt sits a whisker from its own younger self while two tartans that share most of their colours sit far apart.</p> <h2 id="judged-the-way-a-weaver-would">Judged the way a weaver would</h2> <p>A tartan is a small palette deployed in a strict order, and that is how ΔTartan reads it. Each <a href="https://www.tartandictionary.org/posts/tartan/">sett</a> becomes a <strong>colour ladder</strong>: its colours are grouped into hue families (red, green, blue…), ranked dark-to-light within each family, and split by prominence into the <strong>ground</strong> — the broad foundation colours that set the cloth's character — and the <strong>decoration</strong> — the thin overstripes and dark accents laid over it.</p>