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 green. The term blue generally describes colors perceived by humans observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450 and 495 nanometres. 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. Linguistic research indicates that languages do not begin by having a word for the colour blue. (For more on this subject, see Blue–green distinction in language.) In Lakota, the word tȟó is used for both blue and green, the two colours not being distinguished in older Lakota. 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". For example, in Vietnamese, the colour of both tree leaves and the sky is xanh. Several languages, including Japanese and Lakota Sioux, use the same word to describe blue and green. In Russian, Spanish 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).
In heraldry, the word azure is used for blue. 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'). 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. 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. 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. Dark blue became a common colour for military uniforms and later, in the late 20th century, for business suits. In the 19th century, synthetic blue dyes and pigments gradually replaced organic dyes and mineral pigments. Europeans wore clothing coloured with the vegetable dye woad until it was replaced by the finer indigo from America.
#Blue halo stock windows#
In the Middle Ages, European artists used it in the windows of cathedrals. In the eighth century Chinese artists used cobalt blue to colour fine blue and white porcelain. 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. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called aerial perspective.īlue has been an important colour in art and decoration since ancient times. An optical effect called the Tyndall effect explains blue eyes. The clear daytime sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. Most blues contain a slight mixture of other colours azure contains some green, while ultramarine contains some violet. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. Clockwise, from top left: A Ukrainian Police officer on duty Tiles of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Iran Red-legged honeycreeper Copper(II) sulfate Sea at the Marshall Islands Planet Earth.īlue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model.
0 kommentar(er)
