Blue is the colour of the clear sky and the
deep sea. It is located between violet and green on the optical spectrum.
Surveys in the U.S. and Europe show that
blue is the colour most commonly associated with harmony, faithfulness,
confidence, distance, infinity, the imagination, cold, and sometimes with
sadness. In U.S.
Etymology and linguistic differences
The modern
English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from the Old French
bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao. In
heraldry, the word azure is used for blue.
In Russian and
some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but rather different
words for light blue (голубой, goluboy) and dark blue (синий, siniy).
Several
languages, including Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Lakota Sioux, use the same
word to describe blue and green. For example, in Vietnamese the colour of both
tree leaves and the sky is xanh. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao)
is often used for colours that English speakers would refer to as green, such
as the colour of a traffic signal meaning "go".
Shades and variations
Blue is the
colour of light between violet and green on the visible spectrum. Hues of blue
include indigo and ultramarine, closer to violet; pure blue, without any
mixture of other colours; Cyan, which is midway on the spectrum between blue
and green, and the other blue-greens turquoise, teal, and aquamarine.
Blues also vary
in shade or tint; darker shades of blue contain black or grey, while lighter
tints contain white. Darker shades of blue include ultramarine, cobalt blue,
navy blue, and Prussian blue; while lighter tints include sky blue, azure, and
Egyptian blue.
Blue pigments
were originally made from minerals such as lapis lazuli, cobalt and azurite,
and blue dyes were made from plants; usually woad in Europe, and Indigofera
tinctoria, or True indigo, in Asia and Africa. Today most blue pigments and
dyes are made by a chemical process.
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