Other forms: pastels
Pastel means pale and soft rather than strong. Pastel shades, a pastel blue, pastel colours.
The colours are made by adding white, which lowers the saturation and raises the lightness — that is all a pastel is. The name comes from the drawing medium: a pastel is a stick of powdered pigment bound with a little gum, and the shades it gives are exactly these. Note that the Latin behind it means paste.
1adjectivepastelPale and soft rather than strong.
“The nursery was painted in pastel shades of pink and blue.”
2nounstickA stick of powdered pigment for drawing.
“The artist smudged the pastels with her finger to soften the sky in her drawing.”
pastel is a colour, or a drawing medium.
Italian pastello comes from Latin pasta, a paste, since a pastel stick is pigment bound into a paste.
French
pastel
English, today
pastel
Borrowed from French pastel. Borrowed from French pastel, from Italian pastello (“pastel”), from Medieval Latin pastellum (“dough, paste”), from Latin pasta (“dough, paste”), ultimately from Ancient Greek πάστη (“dough, paste”). a doublet of pastegh and pastiglia and pastila and pastilla and pastille.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Colours & Patterns