COMMENTERS:

Stop speculating. Comments that are purely speculative have been removed and will continue to be removed.

Stop giving anecdotal evidence that you once knew a Mr. Blue. Comments that are purely anecdotal have been removed and will continue to be removed.

Stop commenting about how many answers are deleted. Yours will just get deleted too. If you want to know why there are so many deleted comments, see the subreddit rules on acceptable answers.

Before commenting, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?

• Have I done research on this question?

• Can I cite my sources?

• Can I answer follow-up questions?

If you answer "Yes" to all of these questions, then you can go ahead and answer. If you answered "no" to even one, save yourself the trouble and don't comment.

EDIT: /u/tim_mcdaniel has provided a much better fleshed out response below. Please check it out for much more detail!

Most English surnames didn't calcify into a strict family name until the Early Modern period. Before that, most people went by their given names, and would sometimes have a secondary name that could help differentiate from someone else with a similar surname.

Many common English surnames can be divided into categories that make sense once you understand that the surname was often just a way to separate you from another person with the same given name. Sometimes it was occupational (Barber, Smith, Archer), sometimes it was geographical (French, Whitford, Field), and other times it was for a defining physical characteristic (Small, for example).

Most, but not all of the color surnames arise from the last category. Someone would be named "White" or "Brown" to describe the color of their hair in differentiation from another person with the same given name in the community. We do this now. If you have two 'Al's in your work place you might call one "Big Al" and one just "Al." In Medieval England, they would say "John White" to differentiate from the other John in the town. Other times color names came from locations (John Greenfield -> John Green; Arthur Whiteford -> Arthur White).

Your question includes a premise that some color surnames are much more common than others. I can't speak to how true this is, but hopefully this post showed how color surnames entered usage, and would help explain why some are very uncommon or non existent.

Edit: Sources

From Dictionary of American Surnames, Oxford University Press, we can see that most of the most common English surnames involving color come from appearance.

Brown: English, Scottish, and Irish: generally a nickname referring to the color of the hair or complexion

White: English, Scottish, and Irish: from Middle English whit ‘white’, hence a nickname for someone with white hair"

Green: one of the most common and widespread of English surnames, either a nickname for someone who was fondness for Green clothing or a shortening of a place name beginning with "Green"

Grey: English: nickname for someone with gray hair or a gray beard, from Old English græg ‘gray'

Edit: speculation I can't speak to the origin of Blue, but I would imagine it was imported with Norman conquests and that the French used different naming conventions.

Edit: Small grammatical fixes.

Edit: As this is /r/askhistorians, there is obviously a desire for strong sourcing. For the fact that most people had only one name - the Domesday book records many landholders and the vast majority have only a first name.

As for surname etymologies - they are commonly available in many places but one is the Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4

On the same note, how come the surname Rossi (reds) is popular in Italy and not in English speaking countries?

Related question: Where does the myth that colour surnames indicate various forms of smith come from? For instance, white is often claimed to derive from white smith, apparently related to silver and gold, but that is a falsehood.

follow up question. Are there any color last names that are specific to a country or region? I know names are language and dialect based so i am interested in if something is only found in one specific group of persons.

After speaking with the moderators I remove my previous comment and recommend this gets crossposted to r/genealogy