Blue

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the colour. For other uses, see Blue (disambiguation).

Blue
 Clockwise, from top left: A Ukrainian Police officer on
duty; Tiles of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Iran; Red-
legged honeycreeper; Copper(II) sulfate; The flag of the
United Nations; Tahana Maru, French Polynesia;
The Pacific Ocean seen from space

Spectral coordinates

Wavelength approx. 450–495 nm

Frequency ~670–610 THz

Colour coordinates

Hex triplet #0000FF

sRGBB (r, g, b) (0, 0, 255)

HSV (h, s, v) (240°, 100%, 100%)

CIELChuv (L, C, h) (32, 131, 266°)

Source HTML/CSS[1]

B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RGB (additive) colour model, as well as in the RYB colour
model (traditional colour theory).[2] It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The
term blue generally describes colours perceived by humans observing light with a dominant wavelength between
approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. 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, calmness, 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, Mongolian, Irish, and some other languages, there is no single word for blue, but rather different words for
light blue (Russian: голубой, goluboj) and dark blue (Russian: синий, sinij) (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 Blue–green distinction in language).

Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the colour blue. [10] 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. [10]

Optics and colour theory

The term blue generally describes colours perceived by humans observing light with a dominant wavelength between
approximately 450 and 495 nanometres.[11] Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look
more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more cyan. Purer blues are
in the middle of this range, e.g., around 470 nanometres.

Isaac Newton included blue as one of the seven colours in his first description of the visible spectrum.[12] He chose
seven colours because that was the number of notes in the musical scale, which he believed was related to the optical
spectrum. He included indigo, the hue between blue and violet, as one of the separate colours, though today it would
be categorized as blue.[13]

In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours (red, yellow, blue), which can be
mixed to form a wide gamut of colours (although the modern CMY model is able to achieve a much wider gamut). Red
and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Mixing all three primary colours together
produces a dark brown. From the Renaissance onward, painters used this system to create their colours (see RYB colour
model).

The RYB model was used for colour printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon as early as 1725. Later, printers discovered that
more accurate colours could be created by using combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink, put onto
separate inked plates and then overlaid one at a time onto paper. This method could produce almost all the colours in
the spectrum with reasonable accuracy.
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Additive colour mixing. The combination of primary colours produces secondary colours where two overlap; the
combination red, green, and blue each in full intensity makes white.

Red, green, and blue subpixels on a liquid-crystal display.

On the HSV colour wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal mixture
of red and green light. On a colour wheel based on traditional colour theory (RYB) where blue was considered a primary
colour, its complementary colour is considered to be orange.[14]