Pill Colors and Shapes: A Guide to Describing a Tablet

When you describe a pill, two of the most useful details are its colour and its shape. They are also two of the easiest to get wrong. This guide explains the standard words used on FDA labels, so the description you enter in a search matches the description in the records.

The standard shapes

FDA labels describe tablet and capsule shapes with a controlled vocabulary. The shapes you will meet most often are:

• Round — the classic flat or slightly domed disc.
• Oval — an egg-shaped tablet, longer than it is wide.
• Capsule — either a true two-piece capsule or a capsule-shaped tablet (labels record the shape, not the construction).
• Rectangular / square — four-sided tablets, sometimes with rounded corners.
• Triangle, pentagon, hexagon, diamond, teardrop, trapezoid, bullet — less common shapes, often chosen by a brand to stand out.

The standard colours

Label colours are plain colour words: white, off-white, yellow, orange, pink, red, blue, green, brown, gray, purple, turquoise, black, and combinations such as "white and blue" for two-tone capsules. Two warnings about colour: lighting changes how a colour looks (check in daylight or under a white light), and an off-white or beige tablet is often recorded simply as "white". If a search with one colour word fails, try the neighbouring one.

Why colour and shape are filters, not identifiers

Colour and shape repeat across thousands of products. There are hundreds of white round tablets in the FDA records alone, so "white and round" cannot name a medicine — it can only shrink the list once you also have the imprint. That is exactly how our tool treats them: the imprint does the identifying; colour and shape narrow the candidates. The reverse is also useful — if your imprint search returns several matches, colour and shape are how you tell them apart.

Size and score count too

Labels also record a pill's size in millimetres and its score — whether it is unscored or grooved to break into two, three or four pieces. Two pills with the same imprint but different sizes are different products. When you open a result on our site, compare the size and score on the page with the pill in your hand as a final check.

And the standing rule applies to every match: a result matches the FDA label for a medicine; it is not proof of what a loose pill is. Confirm with a pharmacist before relying on any identification.