Other forms: blues
Blue is the colour of a clear sky. Painted blue, blue eyes, a blue jumper.
It also means sad: feeling blue, the Monday blues — and the blues is the musical form built on that. Out of the blue means completely unexpectedly. Blue is the colour of many uniforms and of one British political party. Note blue-collar, meaning manual work; once in a blue moon; and that blue was the last basic colour term to be named in many languages, which is why ancient texts describe seas as wine-dark.
1nounblueThe colour of a clear sky.~98%
“The whole room was painted blue in about 1978.”
2adjectivesadSad.~2%
“He was feeling blue for about a fortnight and then cheered up.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
blue is a colour, or a mood.
Frankish blao came into English through French, replacing the native Old English word. Its Proto-Indo-European root meant yellow or pale, which shifted through several colours before settling.
Middle English
blew
English, today
blue
Built from
From Middle English blew. From Middle English blew,blewe, from Anglo-Norman blew, from Middle French bleu, from Old French bloe, bleve, blef (“blue”), from Frankish blāu (“blue”) (perhaps through a Latin blāvus, blāvius (“blue”) attested from Isidore of Seville), from Proto-Germanic blēwaz (“blue, dark blue”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰlēw- (“yellow, blond, grey”). Cognate with dialectal English blow (“blue”), Scots blue, blew (“blue”), frr bla, blö (“blue”), stq blau (“blue”), Dutch blauw (“blue”), German blau (“blue”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish blå (“blue”), Faroese bláur (“blue”), Icelandic blár (“blue”), Latin flāvus (“yellow”), French bleu (“blue”), mga blá (“yellow”). Doublet of blow.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA