This article is about the colour.

For other uses, see Blue (disambiguation).

Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour
theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model.[2] It lies
between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The term blue generally
describes colors perceived by humans observing light with a dominant
wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. Most blues contain a
slight mixture of other colours; azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains
some violet. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical
effect known as Rayleigh scattering. An optical effect called the Tyndall
effect explains blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical
effect called aerial perspective.

Blue has been an important colour in art and decoration since ancient times. The semi-
precious stone lapis lazuli was used in ancient Egypt for jewellery and ornament and
later, in the Renaissance, to make the pigment ultramarine, the most expensive of all
pigments.[3] In the eighth century Chinese artists used cobalt blue to colour fine blue and
white porcelain. In the Middle Ages, European artists used it in the windows
of cathedrals. Europeans wore clothing coloured with the vegetable dye woad until it
was replaced by the finer indigo from America. In the 19th century, synthetic blue dyes
and pigments gradually replaced organic dyes and mineral pigments. Dark blue became
a common colour for military uniforms and later, in the late 20th century, for business
suits. Because blue has commonly been associated with harmony, it was chosen as the
colour of the flags of the United Nations and the European Union.[4]
In the United States and Europe, blue is the colour that both men and women are most
likely to choose as their favourite, with at least one recent survey showing the same
across several other countries, including China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.[5][6] Past
surveys in the US and Europe have found that blue is the colour most commonly
associated with harmony, confidence, masculinity, knowledge, intelligence, calm,
distance, infinity, the imagination, cold, and sadness.[7]

Etymology and linguistics

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 (meaning 'shimmering, lustrous').[8] In heraldry, the word azure is
used for blue.[9]
In Russian, Spanish[10] and some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but
rather different words for light blue (голубой, goluboj; Celeste) and dark blue
(синий, sinij; Azul). See Colour term.
Several languages, including Japanese 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". In Lakota, the word tȟó is used for both blue and green, the two
colours not being distinguished in older Lakota. (For more on this subject,
see Distinguishing blue from green in language.)

Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the
colour blue.[11] Colour names often developed individually in natural languages, typically
beginning with black and white (or dark and light), and then adding red, and only much
later – usually as the last main category of colour accepted in a language – adding the
colour blue, probably when blue pigments could be manufactured reliably in the culture
using that language.[11]