Thanks to all that replied. amw1's code was helpful but didn't deal with the possibility of multiple-word color names. I like how he got the completed order into a data structure though.

ikegami's advice to seperate tokenizing and parsing was good and I will probably have to go that way soon to deal with things like "burnt umber", "lt. blk" etc. It seems it will be easier and more modular. Unfortunately I have a lot of input already in a fixed format so I can't quote the color names. I'll see if it can be changed for future input.

In the end I went with a variation on solo and revdiablo's suggestions:

color: /(??{join ("|", @colors)})/
[download]