From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blue
— Spectral coordinates —
Wavelength		440–490 nm
— Common connotations —
ice, water, sky, sadness, winter, royalty, boys, cold, calm, magic, trueness (taken from the fact that the sky is blue in its constancy, i.e.: 'true blue', the sky is unwaveringly blue on a clear day), conservatism (universally), liberalism (US), and capitalism
— Colour coordinates —
Hex triplet		#0000FF
sRGBB	(r, g, b)	(0, 0, 255)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(240°, 100%, 100%)
Source		HTML/CSS[1]
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

Etymology and definitions

Blueberries

Lactarius indigo is one of only a few blue-coloured mushrooms

Blue Turkish Tiles

The sky and water often appear blue

In science

Pigments

Scientific natural standards for blue

• Emission spectrum of Cu²⁺
• Electronic spectrum of aqua-ions Cu(H₂O)2+5

Animals

Dendrobates azureus

Blue Jay

• When an animal's coat is described as "blue", it usually refers to a shade of grey that takes on a bluish tint, a diluted variant of a pure black coat.^{.October 2007" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed]} This designation is used for a variety of animals, including dog coats, some rat coats, cat coats, some chicken breeds, some horse coat colours and rabbit coat colours.^ Warm and cold were, with dry and moist, terms used from the Middle Ages through the 18th century to describe a variety of animal and physical qualities.
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  ^ The White Coats”, of course, those self elevated and pompous torturer of defenseless animals.
  • Blue Food Dye Treats Spine Injury in Rats | Wired Science | Wired.com 10 February 2010 12:25 UTC www.wired.com [Source type: General]
  
  Some animals, such as Giraffes and Lizards, also have blue tongues.

In human culture

Symbolic language

• In the English language, blue often represents the human emotion of sadness, e.g. "He was feeling blue". In German, on the other hand, to be "blue" (blau sein) is to be drunk. .This derives from the ancient use of urine (which is produced copiously by the human body after drinking alcohol) in dyeing cloth blue with woad or indigo.^ This is primarily because most grays or dark neutral mixtures used in painting, including payne's gray, indigo and neutral tint, actually have a distinct blue or green tint.
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  ^[5] It may also be in relation to rain, which is usually regarded as a trigger of depressive emotions.^[6]
.

• Conversely blue, a very popular color^[7] can represent happiness and optimism^[8] as days with clearer, blue skies tend to be considered times where these emotions are more easily expressed.^ At these times the low sky can appear to shade from a grayish deep yellow into scarlet (photo, right).
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  ^ In painting this is commonly represented as a shift toward blue, with a loss of colorfulness (graying) and contrast in all colors, but especially warm colors (which shift toward green).
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  ^ Second, most colors shift toward yellow as the luminance on or through them becomes more intense: blue violets become blue, blues become blue green, greens become yellow green, oranges become deep yellow, and "spectrum" reds become orange.
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  .Many artistic contributions have been made referencing clear days with blue skies as part of the happiness or as a symbolism of the happiness the artist felt, such as Tony Bennett's Put on a Happy Face.^ The artist can only marvel that the solar light and atmosphere can weave such a narrow chromaticity path and yet create so many landscape color changes and light contrasts.
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  ^ On a hot summer's day a noon blue sky radiates far more heat than the reddish sunset, so why isn't blue warm and red cool?
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  ^[9] If this were untrue there would obviously be more complaints about days with clear blue skies.

• Blue is commonly used in the Western hemisphere to symbolize the male gender in contrast to pink used for females.

National colours

Flag of Greece

Coat of Arms symbol of Israel

• Azzurro, a light blue, is the national colour of Italy (from the livery colour of the former reigning family, the House of Savoy).
• Blue is the national sports colour for India, as it denotes secularism.^{.June 2009" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed]}
• Blue is the national colour used on flags of several countries surrounded by seas or oceans such as Australia and Europe, though not necessarily with this interpretation in mind.
• Blue and white are the national colours of Argentina, El Salvador, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Micronesia, Nicaragua, and Somalia as well as of the United Nations Organization using a light shade of blue symbolizing peace.
• Blue and yellow are the national colours of Barbados, Kazakhstan, Palau, Sweden, and Ukraine, and along with green, of Brazil, and along with red, of Chad, Colombia, Ecuador, Moldova, Romania, and Venezuela.
• Blue, white and yellow are the national colours of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Uruguay.
• Blue and red are the national colours of Haiti and Liechtenstein, and (along with white) of Australia, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, France, Iceland, North Korea, Laos, Liberia, Luxembourg, Myanmar, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Russia, Samoa, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States
• Blue, white and black are the national colours of Estonia.^ This approach is attractive when the artist intends to use yellow as the symbol of light .
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  ^ Even so, the typical representation of night relies on a near monochrome palette of blues or blue greens, with yellow accents contributed by isolated artificial lights and the near surfaces they illuminate.
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  ^ A saturated yellow or orange paint is much lighter valued and more intense than any green or blue paint.
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  ^[10]

Mysticism

• In Hinduism, Blue is used to symbolically represent the fifth, throat chakra (Vishuddha).^[11]

Politics

Main article: Political colour

• The Blue House is the residence of the President of South Korea^[12].
• Blue has been associated with a variety of political positions, often differentiated from communist red or anarchist black.^ These relative comparisons are most often applied to analogous colors (of similar hue) — a "warm blue" (compared to other blues) or a "cool red" (compared to other reds).
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  During the revolt in the Vendée against the French revolution, blues stood for the revolutionary forces, and white for the counter-revolutionaries. Later movements like the Breton blues used the colour to signify allegiance to the ideals of the revolution.
• The blueshirts was a quasi-fascist political organization active in Ireland during the 1930s (the name comes from the fact that St. Patrick's Blue is one of the traditional colours of Ireland).
• Blue is the colour of the respective British and Canadian Conservative parties. In the United States, however, it has become fashionable since the 2000 Presidential Election to refer to the Democratic Party as "blue" and the Republican Party as "red", particularly as in reference to "red states and blue states". In Brazil, blue states are the ones in which the Social Democratic Party has the majority, in opposition to the Workers' Party, usually represented by red.

Blue stripes on a traditional Jewish tallit.

Religion

.

• Blue is associated in Christianity generally and Catholicism in particular, with the Virgin Mary.
• Blue in Hinduism: Many of the gods are depicted as having blue-coloured skin, particularly those associated with Vishnu, who is said to be the Preserver of the world and thus intimately connected to water.^ Thus, layers of translucent yellow material redden as they become thicker, cyan tropical shallows darken to blue as waters get deeper.
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  Krishna and Ram, Vishnu's avatars, are usually blue. .Shiva, the Destroyer, is also depicted in light blue tones and is called neela kantha, or blue-throated, for having swallowed poison in an attempt to turn the tide of a battle between the gods and demons in the gods' favour.
• Blue in Judaism: In the Torah,^[13] the Israelites were commanded to put fringes, tzitzit, on the corners of their garments, and to weave within these fringes a "twisted thread of blue (tekhelet)".^[14] In ancient days, this blue thread was made from a dye extracted from a Mediterranean snail called the hilazon.^ Within these levels, players will learn command hierarchy, become familiar with time travel, and begin to utilize time travel strategies.
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  ^ These colors appear because "green" light shifts all "red" wavelengths toward yellow and all "blue" wavelengths toward blue green (cerulean).
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  ^ So the warm/cool contrast is fundamentally a judgment of the balance in a light mixture between the wavelengths shorter than green ( blue and violet ) and longer than green ( yellow and red ).
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  Maimonides claimed that this blue was the colour of "the clear noonday sky"; Rashi, the colour of the evening sky.^[15] According to several rabbinic sages, blue is the colour of God's Glory.^[16] Staring at this colour aids in mediation, bringing us a glimpse of the "pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity", which is a likeness of the Throne of God.^[17] (The Hebrew word for glory.) Many items in the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in the wilderness, such as the menorah, many of the vessels, and the Ark of the Covenant, were covered with blue cloth when transported from place to place.^[18]
• Blue in Islam: In verse 20:102 of the Qur’an, the word زرق zurq (plural of azraq 'blue') is used metaphorically for evildoers whose eyes are glazed with fear, as if the sclera is filmed over with a bluish tint.

Symbolism

• In Thailand, blue is associated with Friday on the Thai solar calendar. Anyone may wear blue on Fridays and anyone born on a Friday may adopt blue as their colour. The Thai language, however, is one that has had trouble distinguishing blue from green. The default word for Blue was recently สีน้ำเงิน literally, the colour of silver, a poetical reference to the silvery sheen of the deep blue sea. It now means Navy Blue, and the default word is now สีฟ้า literally, the colour of the sky.^[19]

Variations

Light blue

Light Blue
— Colour coordinates —
Hex triplet		#ADD8E6
RGBB	(r, g, b)	(173, 216, 230)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(240°, 90%, 80%)
Source		X11
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

The web colour light blue is displayed in the colour box at right. Also could be known as sky blue, baby blue, or angel blue. The first recorded use of "light blue" as a colour term in English is in the year 1915.^[20]

Medium blue

Medium blue
— Colour coordinates —
Hex triplet		#0000CD
RGBB	(r, g, b)	(0, 0, 205)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(240°, 100%, 40%)
Source		X11
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

Displayed at right is the colour medium blue.

Pigment blue

Pigment Blue
— Colour coordinates —
Hex triplet		#333399
RGBB	(r, g, b)	(51, 51, 153)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(240°, 50%, 35%)
Source		CMYK
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

At right is the colour pigment blue. This is the colour that is achieved by mixing an equal amount of process cyan (printer's cyan) and process magenta (printer's magenta).

Dark blue

Dark blue
— Colour coordinates —
Hex triplet		#00008B
RGBB	(r, g, b)	(0, 0, 139)
HSV	(h, s, v)	(240°, 100%, 25%)
Source		X11
B: Normalized to [0–255] (byte)

Dark blue is a shade of blue. The name comes from the word "Dark" (which originated from Old English dark, derk, deork; Anglo-Saxon dearc, and Gaelic and Irish dorch, dorcha) and "Blue" (taken from French and originated from the Indo-European root bhlewos).

Variations of blue in culture

Cartography

.

• In historical atlases published in Germany, light blue is traditionally used as a colour to represent Germany, as opposed to pink for England, purple for France, and light green for Russia.^ Greens are cooled by mixture with purples or blues.
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  ^ When you "cool" a warm color in paint mixtures, it is important to use a blue that contains no red reflectance and no green hue.
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  ^ This is primarily because most grays or dark neutral mixtures used in painting, including payne's gray, indigo and neutral tint, actually have a distinct blue or green tint.
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  ^[21]

Fashion

.

• Dark clothing for males such as black, brown, or dark blue business suits have become much more popular since the mid-1990s,^{[citation needed]} as opposed to the pastel coloured business suits worn in the 1970s by major leaders in such institutions as the United States Congress (the vast difference in the clothing worn in the 1970s as opposed to the 2000s can be readily seen by looking at a videotape of the Watergate hearings).

^ A saturated yellow or orange paint is much lighter valued and more intense than any green or blue paint.

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^ Second, most colors shift toward yellow as the luminance on or through them becomes more intense: blue violets become blue, blues become blue green, greens become yellow green, oranges become deep yellow, and "spectrum" reds become orange.

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^ Hues appear to shift warm or cool, colors become more or less saturated, lighter or darker, and complementary shadow colors change from violet to blue green.

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He is holding a radio." src="http://images-mediawiki-sites.thefullwiki.org/11/1/1/4/17858871824037287.jpg" width="170" height="255" class="thumbimage" />

German police officer

Law Enforcement

• In some parts of the world, police wear dark blue or, sometimes, medium blue uniforms.

Human sexuality

• In the bandana code of the gay leather subculture, wearing a medium blue bandana means one is into the fetish of having sex with someone who is wearing a police uniform.^[22]
• In Russian, the word for light blue, голубой, can be used to mean 'homosexual'.^[23]

Sociology

• Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.^{.June 2009" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed]} In Western civilization, those in the upper classes in high places of political or economic power often wear dark blue suits.^ (The dark blue points above this curve at left are lighter valued rose pigments; those below the curve are earth pigments and dull synthetic organic pigments such as perylene maroon.
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  Ordinary members of the working class (especially those who work in the computer industry) often refer derisively to these management functionaries as the suits.^[24] This terminology is also used in the television industry--the network executives are often referred to by the creative people (actors, directors, and screenwriters) as the suits.^[25]

See also

• Blue flag
• Blue movie
• Blue ribbon
• Blue Screen of Death
• Distinguishing "blue" from "green" in language
• Engineer's blue
• Lapis lazuli, a blue stone
• List of colours
• Non-photo blue
• St. Patrick's Blue
• Three Colors: Blue, a film
• Turquoise

References

1. ^ "W3C TR CSS3 Color Module, HTML4 color keywords". W3.org. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#html4. Retrieved 2009-04-14. 
2. ^ "Glossary Term: Color wheel". Sanford-artedventures.com. http://www.sanford-artedventures.com/study/g_color_wheel.html. Retrieved 2009-04-14. 
3. ^ Merriam-Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary Springfield, Mass.:1984--Merriam-Webster Page 319
4. ^ "US Navy - origins of Navy Terminology"
5. ^ Heller, Eva. Wie Farben wirken: Farbpsychologie, Farbsymbolik, kreative Farbgestaltung. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2004.
6. ^ Top 10 weather complaints
7. ^ Preferences - Favorite Color
8. ^ Psychology of Color
9. ^ "Put on a Happy Face" lyrics
10. ^ "Estonia in brief: National Symbols" at Estonica website Estonica.org
11. ^ Stevens, Samantha. The Seven Rays: a Universal Guide to the Archangels. City: Insomniac Press, 2004. ISBN 1894663497 pg. 24
12. ^ Cheong Wa Dae / The Blue House, http://english.president.go.kr/tours/place_buildings/main_office.php, "The Main Building and its two annexes are covered with a total of 150,000 traditional Korean blue roof tiles (hence, the name "Blue House" is also commonly used when referring to Cheongwadae)." 
13. ^ Numbers 15:38.
14. ^ Tekhelet.com, the Ptil Tekhelet Organization
15. ^ Mishneh Torah, Tzitzit 2:1; Commentary on Numbers 15:38.
16. ^ Numbers Rabbah 14:3; Hullin 89a.
17. ^ Exodus 24:10; Ezekiel 1:26; Hullin 89a.
18. ^ Numbers 4:6-12.
19. ^ Glenn Slayden. "Thai language". thai-language.com. http://www.thai-language.com/dict/. Retrieved 2009-04-14. 
20. ^ Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 190
21. ^ See the Grosshistoricher Weltatlas, 1965 edition (Other German historical atlases use these same colours.)
22. ^ Card showing list of bandana colours and their meanings, available at Image Leather, 2199 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94114
23. ^ "Gay.ru". Gay.ru. http://english.gay.ru/life/history/queermoscow/. Retrieved 2009-04-14. 
24. ^ The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, Clifford Stoll, 1989, ISBN 0-7434-1146-3
25. ^ Shatner, William (with Chris Kreski) Star Trek Memories New York:1993 HarperCollins

Electromagnetic spectrum ← shorter wavelengths       longer wavelengths → Gamma rays · X-rays · Ultraviolet · Visible · Infrared · Terahertz radiation · Microwave · Radio Visible (optical) Violet · Blue · Green · Yellow · Orange · Red Microwaves W band · V band · Q band · Ka band · K band · Ku band · X band · S band · C band · L band Radio EHF · SHF · UHF · VHF · HF · MF · LF · VLF · ULF · SLF · ELF Wavelength types Microwave · Shortwave · Medium wave · Longwave

Web colours
black	gray	silver	white	maroon	red	purple	fuchsia	green	lime	olive	yellow	navy	blue	teal	aqua

Shades of blue
Air Force blue	Alice blue	Azure	Baby blue	Bleu de France	Blue	Bondi blue	Brandeis blue	Cambridge Blue	Carolina blue
Ceil	Cerulean	Cobalt blue	Columbia blue	Cornflower blue	Cyan	Dark blue	Deep sky blue	Denim	Dodger blue
Duke blue	Egyptian blue	Electric blue	Eton blue	Federal Blue	Glaucous	Han blue	Iceberg	Indigo	International Klein Blue
Iris	Light blue	Majorelle Blue	Maya blue	Midnight blue	Navy blue	Non-photo blue	Palatinate blue	Periwinkle	Persian blue
Powder blue	Prussian blue	Royal blue	Sapphire	Sky blue	Steel blue	Teal	Tiffany Blue	Ultramarine	Yale Blue
The samples shown above are representative only.

Major colors — List Major primary colors Additive colors: Blue          Navy | Lime          Green | Red          Maroon — Subtractive colors: Cyan          Teal | Magenta or Fuchsia          Purple | Yellow          Olive Major secondary colors Orange          Brown | Pink          Violet — Neutral color:      Black | Grey or Gray          Silver |      White

Categories: Optical spectrum | Symbols of California | Shades of blue

Hidden categories: Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages | Wikipedia semi-protected pages | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from October 2007 | Articles with unsourced statements from June 2009 | Articles needing additional references from October 2007 | All articles needing additional references | Articles with unsourced statements from June 2008

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• The Red Hill Hoodoos These natural pillars of rock stand 100 feet above the ground.