Three digits (473), four digits (4702), an R for the decimal point (4R7), or an EIA-96 code (01C).
Plain ohms, or 4k7, 2.2M, 470R.
Digit, digit, multiplier, tolerance — the standard 4-band code (IEC 60062). Two significant figures and a power of ten is all the code can express, which is why the values you can actually buy are the ones they are. The same band rendering lives inside Electrical Circuit when you solve for resistance.
Yellow, violet, red, gold. Yellow is 4, violet is 7, red multiplies by 100: 47 × 100 = 4.7 kΩ. Gold is the tolerance band at ±5%.
So the part in your hand is guaranteed to be somewhere between 4,465 Ω and 4,935 Ω — a spread of nearly 500 Ω. If your design genuinely needs 4.7 kΩ rather than "about 4.7 kΩ", the colour code is not the thing to rely on; measure it.
The tolerance band (gold/silver) is usually set slightly apart toward one end — start from the other end.
Not every ohm value maps to exact 2-digit × 10ⁿ bands. Encode mode rounds to the nearest representable 4-band value.
4-band IEC 60062 only. It assumes the bands are read from the end furthest from the tolerance band, and that the colours are true — both assumptions fail often enough in practice to be worth checking. Not covered: 5-band and 6-band parts (a third significant digit, and a temperature-coefficient band), the obsolete body-tip-dot scheme, and surface-mount numeric codes. The colour code says nothing at all about power rating — that comes from the physical size of the part.
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.