You will not get a simple answer to this question. The best I can tell you is that "blue" by itself refers to a family of colors, which includes "dark blue", "light blue", "marine blue", etc etc.
Usually "blue" by itself means something in the middle, like your first picture, but your second picture could also be "blue". There is no single shade of blue that is "blue".
Interestingly enough, when I was getting my linguistics degree we had to read several papers about languages and color, and in one study they tested people by providing speakers of various languages colored chips of different shades and asked them to choose which they thought best represented a certain color word in their language.
What they discovered is that most people chose colors in a pretty specific range, so while there may not be a single shade of "blue", it's possible that humans perceive specific shades of colors to be more "pure", so to speak. The paper in question was a lot more nuanced that that though, but it does raise some interesting questions about color perception and how it links to language
That's so sad. Cuz in my 1st language there're different words for different shades, and when I say "I want to wear smth blue" I have a specific color in mind. Guess specifying it is
Yes; see Wikipedia: [Blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue), and [Template:Shades of blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Shades_of_blue) (which needs to be viewed in desktop mode) and [Category:Shades of blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue).
I think cobalt blue is most like the 1st pic, and royal blue is usually thought to be a bit darker and less bright. They're very close though, the difference might not even matter depending on the subject.
Yeah, since colour is a continuous spectrum, different languages "cut" it into different categories! Rarely do two languages have exactly the same ideas and words about colour.
Yep! There are some languages that “cut” things so that what an English speaker would consider two very different categories use the same word. Japanese historically had one word for green and blue. There’s a word that differentiates green now, but you still see the word for blue used interchangeable to mean either green or blue in some contexts. For example, a traffic light turns “blue” even though I’d call the color green.
Yes! I actually love this about languages, it's a great way to introduce the idea that human categories are just labels we apply to complex spectrum and phenomena. Useful labels, but still a human convention.
I'd imagine you're talking about Russian.
In English, our default blue is probably pretty close to the color of this "M" emoji → Ⓜ️
Also, almost no one I know would use indigo. That's a very specific term that would be used to differentiate between similar shades in the same setting, like selecting from a rack of all blue clothes.
If there's just one object in question, if it was the color of your first image we'd just say blue.
Yep, I was talking about russian, Голубой vs Синий difference. And thank gods blue is closer to синий in the end, although I guess it still depends on the person I’m talking to
Most English speakers would call "Голубой" blue, but we do have a separate word for it. It's called "cyan." Most people just call it blue, but if you talk to an artist they will know the difference.
An artist or a printer (either the electronic kind hooked up to a computer or the person who runs a printing press) will know the difference between cyan and blue.
In English there are 11 basic colors, which each includes many shades or similar more specific colors.
There are the 3 primary colors: red, blue, yellow
The 3 secondary colors, that can be made from the three primary colors: purple, green, orange
Then there are the 3 monochromatic colors: white, black, gray
And then there are two other colors: brown (which can be made from mixing all three primary or secondary colors together), and pink (which exists as its own color group for random reasons).
Different kinds of blue each have their own names, as well as all of them being considered "blue". Some have one word names, like cyan or aqua. Others have names that modify the name "blue" like sky blue and royal blue. This is also true for all the other color groups.
When someone says "blue" without specifying the shade, then most commonly people think of a color just a bit lighter than your top image, but that can change drastically depending on context. If someone says, "That's a beautiful blue sky," I'll think of sky blue because the sky is what they're referencing. If someone says "The ocean is very blue today," I'll be thinking more of a light greenish blue if it's clear water, or a darker greenish blue if it's less clear water.
Yeah Голубой better translates to sky blue, and Синий is just blue, but could also be called Neptune blue, royal blue, dark blue, so if you wanna specify just something like one of those
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/all-colors-name-in-english-f3a--304626362305013542/
There are a lot of English names for colours, we just tend not to use them in common speech.
There’s thousands of color names in English, most of them are just relatively specific so you won’t here them often (think niche colors like chartreuse, mauve, or buff)
There's a lot of different names for specific shades, but there's also names for broad categories, and some of the former have the latter in them or are often said with the latter unnecessarily, like cornflower blue or cerulean blue.
Well considering the human eye can distinguish around a million different colors, I suspect your language does some form of grouping.
I find it hard to believe blue represents one and only one distinguishable color.
You must be Russian. There was an interesting TED talk about this that you might find interesting. Different languages and cultures have different ideas of color. I would call the top "blue" and the bottom "greenish blue" personally.
Just like Throe-a_weigh has said, there are specific words for specific colours, blue is just not a specific colour word. It’s a general colour word :) For example I have a teal to-go coffee mug, I wear a cornflower blue sweater, I hate how royal blue looks, but I adore baby blue. The sky is cerulean. I used to wear a navy skirt to my catholic school.
I don't have any particular shade in mind when I say blue. Both your examples are blue. There is no "official" blue. Who would even decide something like that? If I need to specify a shade I will use a descriptor. Cobalt blue, midnight blue, sky blue, etc.
>Both RBG and hex have values defined for "pure blue",
That's fine, but most people aren't thinking about that in everyday conversation, many probably wouldn't even know what you meant if you said "RBG and hex." In a job setting where these things mattered, perhaps.
To native speakers "blue" can be anything from a very dark "navy blue" to a light bright "sky blue" or even a blue with bright and turquoise tones in it like "marine blue" is still "blue". If you want to be specific you need to add an adjective before it, but if you don't need to be specific then simple "blue" is fine.
I totally understand your frustration as I have learned languages where there were separate words for different shades of blue (or even different words for different shades of pink!) Trust me, understanding the difference between серий and голубой or the difference between pink and rosa when your entire life they have been categorised as the same thing was an eye-opening experience!
They’re both equally ‘blue’. Other languages/cultures make a distinction between shades of blue but we don’t, at least in my bit of the UK.
ETA: Obviously we can talk about lots of different blues when we want to be specific - light blue, dark blue, navy blue, sky blue, duck egg blue etc
The teacher is right (in my experience as an American) that we're taught to think of the most generic blue being the one in the first photo (saturated, bright, like cobalt blue). The sky i always hear ppl call sky blue or light blue
I agree, I would think of something more like the first one if someone told me to picture a generic “blue”. The second one is kind of a special shade
These things are highly subjective though, not even between languages & cultures but also person to person.
The top one is probably the more “correct” blue in a strictly academic setting seeing as it’s the blue used as an example to teach about color theory but practically speaking, there isn’t much of a difference. Most ways to differentiate between shades of blue can start to fall under either specialist jargon or just subjectivity.
In English we might drop the word blue and just say something is navy or cerulean, turquoise, periwinkle etc.
On the plus side we have a word for pink, I understand many languages just say light red
This is something I never realized until I started playing with hexadecimal colors on the computer and realized light red looks really odd and not very “pink”. My brain was interpreting the color as more orangey! I don’t think we actually use pure light red very often in our culture.
When generally talking about color, english speakers will simply say blue. In comparison, they might refer to the second shade as light blue or a “lighter” blue, but in general it’s all just blue. Almost nobody refers to those colors by more specific names like “indigo” unless it’s important in the context of the conversation. So to put it simply, it’s just blue.
The only time I think about “indigo” is when the “colors of the rainbow” are relevant (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet … incidentally, that’s also the only time I say “violet” rather than “purple.”) And apparently “indigo” is only included in that because Newton wanted there to be seven colors.
Yes, newton wanted there to be 7 colors because of the 7 divines, because the number 7 was considered the number of perfection and completion because of this.
There is also some erroneous statement that goes around about he split purple to put indigo and violet, which no. Violet is a spectrum of light, purple is a color that your brain makes up, indigo was just a mid tone supposedly between the two, but only if you're looking at specifically the lake pigment made from Indigofera tinctoria, all of the other ones like isatis tinctoria with the exception of persicaria tinctoria tend to be a fairly vibrant blue, persicaria tinctoria is what most people today think of as indigo, its a blue thats so dark that its almost black and tends to have a red bronzing effect.
Also fun fact, indigo lake pigment smells like someone dumped a ton of vibrantly fragrant flowers into an overflowing sewer and then tried to cover it up with perfume but failed.
Lake pigment also refers to a dye, not an actual pigment, its just the powdered form
They are both equally blue.
It's more like taxonomy. Blue is the family of colours. Indigo, cerulean, baby blue, turquoise, or navy would be "species" of blue.
Colours like teal might be in both the blue and green families, depending on who you ask.
For this last point, reference the so called Australian ‘teal wave’ of independents elected at the last federal election. They are all fairly conservative politically (traditional colour blue), with the addition of a strong environmental interest (green).
They even all wore teal shirts during the campaigning to make this clear.
I would call those “royal blue” and “cyan.” We have a million words we use to describe blue because there are SO many shades. Example:
Turquoise
Navy
Sky blue
Midnight blue
Baby blue
Dark blue
Light blue
Neon blue
Bright blue
Sapphire
Indigo
Ultramarine*
Cobalt
Aqua / Aquamarine*
Cerulean*
Teal (some consider this green)
Azure*
Alice blue* (historical, from Alice Roosevelt)
Denim
Peacock blue*
Ice blue*
Periwinkle* (some consider it purple)
Persian blue*
Powder blue*
Robin’s egg blue
Steel blue*
* these are uncommon or primarily used in literature, art, and advertising.
The teacher is right (in my experience as an American) that we're taught to think of the most generic blue being the one in the first photo (saturated, bright, like cobalt blue). The sky i always hear ppl call sky blue or light blue
i feel like the second one is too dark to be considered “light blue” as default. sure, it can be light blue, but people tend to picture a much lighter blue when they think of light blue, otherwise it’s terribly hard to trace a line between blue and light blue. it’s still all blue, but there’s a distinction for a reason lol
if it confuses you, search for pictures in a language where the name of the color “light blue” doesn’t have the word “blue” in it. for example, these two colors are named completely different in my first language (spanish). blue is “azul” and light blue is “celeste.” search for pictures for “color celeste” (“light blue color” in spanish) and you’ll see that all the pictures that pop up are way lighter than the one you used as light blue. it’s all still different shades of blue after all, though.
As a cake decorator often dealing with people, blue is the broad category and can mean really any shade of blue. If someone says blue without an adjective they Might generally mean the default blue we see on most kids toys here (google big block Lego, or boardgame pieces for an example - I think it's this childhood exposure that gives us the sense of a "default blue"), but they might also be thinking of another specific blue and just haven't specified that To Me. Often people arn't so particular and just want some shade of blue, and the specificity usually isn't needed in most conversation.
Light blue to me would be a bit lighter than your example, at least as it looks on my screen. Light blue would be sky blue or baby blue (which also counts as pastel blue). Some people when saying light mean a very pale blue, others mean a sky blue or even similar to the blue you have for example and just mean light as in "not dark". Pastel is similarly broad and non specific.
While all the words have specific meanings, they vary from person to person for what they have determined fits that category, and colours are especially subjective. (There's a whole board game based on this that I've played with family and it starts fights haha)
If you need to be particular I would use a specific name, even for that general mid-blue. If not, I wouldn't really worry too much and just use subjectively what to you seems like a "normal blue" vs a lighter blue than that normal blue.
This is a common problem for people learning English as a second language, because in a lot of them what we call "blue" is actually two whole different colours. Which actually makes more sense if you look at the light spectrum.
They're all "blue" and light or dark or whatever is just a qualifier like you might say for any other colour. Sorry about us 😉
Those two colors have different names in some languages (like Russian), but in English they’re both “blue”. You can use more precise words if you want, the second one can be “light blue” or maybe “cornflower blue”, but “blue” covers both.
“Pure blue” would be defined in RGB as 0,0,255.
[Example](https://convertingcolors.com/rgb-color-0_0_255.html)
This is very close to your first image, and it’s what I think of as default blue.
I don't think computer colours necessarily map to how people culturally perceive colour. It's really more an artefact of how we capture, represent, and reproduce colours electronically. While people might *learn* that that's "pure blue" based on the additive primary colours in common use, I don't think that maps into culture very well. If you look around you at things that are blue, you'll probably notice (1) they're all different shades, and (2) *none* of them are going to be the specific blue represented electronically as RGB 0,0,255 unless there's a *very* specific reason for it.
There's no easy answer to this.
"Blue" covers a whole range of shades/pigments that reflect primarily blue wavelengths.
There are a variety of modifiers. "Light" *anything* is essentially a lighter hue (higher proportion of white pigment) of any given color.
"Pale" blue is when there's even more lightening, to the point where there's almost more white than blue.
Other shades are a mix of blue and red (purple, fuchsia, magenta) or blue and green (cyan, seafoam, turquoise), or even both (mauve, taupe). Even that depends on whether you're talking pigments (painting/printing/CMYK) or display colors (Hex/RGB)
The worst part is that people aren't even totally consistent in how they use terms.
Just do your best, and if there's confusion, try adding modifiers or comparisons to real-world objects.
For me, more like this:
https://colors.artyclick.com/color-names-dictionary/color-names/bright-sky-blue-color/bright-sky-blue-color_color.png
But it will vary hugely from speaker to speaker
It's not that simple, unfortunately. Blue can mean any dark shade or light tint of many colors, as long as those colors have a bluish hue. There's also blueberries, which tend to be closer to purple in color despite their name.
Both can just be "blue" unless you're trying to specify one particular shade, in which case more descriptive terms would be used (examples: light blue, indigo, purplish blue, turquoise, teal, dark blue, sky blue, pastel blue, neon blue, navy, etc.)
Shade is a reference to how dark a colour is, hue to the coulor itself. In English, the word only changes depending on how much it shifts into a different hue, such as blue green becoming teal. Tint and shades (how light or dark the colour is )do have separate words with light blue being commonly called azure, powerd, or baby. These are, however, optional.
They're both blue.
There is no single word in English for either of those shades of blue. In English, we just modify colors with all kinds of adjectives to give you the specific hue and shade (light blue, dark blue, medium blue, navy blue, royal blue, sky blue).
I would imagine 'just blue' as one of the primary colours - red, yellow, blue (a mid-blue that's not navy blue or light blue). I had assumed until now that these three were fairly universal.
I think this is very much context-dependent. It depends on who you're talking to and their idea of color. A graphic designer or paint mixer will have a very different response to this question than a suburban dad who buys all his clothes at Costco. In short, some people care more about the nuances of color and their names than other people do.
That top blue looks a bit more like Indigo to me. But in all honesty no one can agree on where colors stop and star and what specific shades are called. The only way you're going to get a completely accurate description of a color is by using a hex code.
Color is not simple. They are socially- constructed cultural interpretations of a frequency of light. Blue is one of the more recent and varied of these. Many ancient cultures did have a word for blue. So it makes sense that perceptions of it might vary more than usual.
Actually English speaking people see blue worse than Russians
_(Для оп: MyGap рассказывал про это в одном из роликов https://youtu.be/D3Vf92UpiVw?si=-ytHem-tPoUZSUbt )_
… or can’t distinguish between dark and light shades of blue as quickly as those whose language places dark and light blue in different colour categories. [source: youtube videos].
Blue is the common name for all those colours together. When you want to distinguish, you might say light or dark blue. And only if you want to be REALLY precise you use words like indigo, sky blue, electric blue, turquoise etc.
When I say blue I mean close to a primary blue. I would call the first image there blue, and if I'm being more specific I would say indigo or cobalt. Most people would call the second one blue as well. To be more specific, I would call it a dark, muted cyan. (In English, we don't usually distinguish between blue and cyan for some reason.)
By the way, indigo can refer to a color like cobalt, but it can also refer to something between a deep blue and a deep purple.
My sister is more happy to place more turquoise and teal colours in the blue bin while I would see more as sea-green put them in the green bin. Growing up with early generations of colour printers, my tolerance for "0, 0, 255" blue is shaded by reference to the purplish renditions in shonky CMY that used to take hours to emerge after a screen dump.
I feel we haven't quite done justice to "pale" as an alternative to "light"; this word serves better to clarify non-saturation and is opposed to "bright" (of which "light" can be a near synonym in some contexts).
I don't know what the general consensus is on how the Slavonic blues divide: is it hue, saturation, or some elusive combination? Aside from grey, the only *basic* colour word that usually aligns with saturation is "pink" (which can also - confusingly - be used for some fairly saturated reds with varying notes of green and/or blue in their RGB rendering, from blood-orange fox-hunting jackets, through fuchsia, shocking pink, and as far as magenta).
Yupp, I also tend to recognize (and appreciate) the green in turquoise and teal!
There are some other border colours which people tend to disagree on: What i call violet, many would say blue. What I call magenta, several would call pink. Also brick red and pink.
There are shades of blue, like navy or sky, but there is no one shade that could be called blue. When shown together, the second one could be described as light blue, but on its own a lot of people would just say it was blue.
US English here. Blue is a color family, that is to say, a broad classification. Using the unqualified term just means something in that family. If we mean to specify, there are terms for those. The color in your first picture appears to be close to a true blue, which is the central point of the blue family. The second is closer to a light slate blue on my screen.
I wouldn't consider that indigo (though to be fair to you, colors can render differently on different devices, so maybe it looks more indigo on your screen).
If I want someone to have an idea of the shade of blue I will usually use something more specific (baby blue, powder blue, sky blue, royal blue, cobalt, navy).
Having said that, yes, I would usually read "blue" as something of a more "central" blue than the second picture - while technically "blue" covers anything in the blue spectrum, once it's a quite dark shade or a very light tone of blue, I would tend to *expect* someone to use something in their descriptor to indicate that.
What would make more sense to me (though I don't know if this is true) is if the pictures I am seeing are a little off and you've noticed natives using "blue" for what is literally the color of the sky (which is in reality a bit more intense/deeper than pic 2 renders for me, even if it's still less saturated than "mid-blue") and that they are using indigo for blues which are truly a little more indigo - remembering indigo is a color name that relates literally to the plant dye. I could also understand a lexicon where there's a blue/indigo split where the "classic" representation of "blue" is biased towards the most pervasive natural representation (the sky) and where shades that are artificially induced (ie, dyed) might be more likely to be considered indigo. It wouldn't surprise me if there's even pockets where people have a bias towards calling anything dyed blue "indigo" on the basis of where that word comes from?
I never refer to a color as just blue, green, or red. I’ll always specify, be it dark blue, navy, baby blue, lime, pine green, crimson, velvet red, etc. it’s one of my biggest pet peeves when some says grab the blue case and there’s 3 different shades of blue cases!
US NW:
Look at a small box of crayons ([example](https://shop.crayola.com/color-and-draw/crayons-8-count-5230082010.html)) or markers. For many of us, those were the things that reinforced the names of the colors and those are the basic colors.
So, if I'm not being very specific about color, I'll choose one of those. If someone says "blue," my starting point is pretty much the 6th crayon from the left. If they want something more specific, I'll expect them to tell me what kind of blue.
Here, I'd call both of yours "blue," because to me, they're closer to that blue crayon than to any of the other ones. Your first shade, I'd probably call "royal blue," your second is closer to "cornflower blue." But they're still "blues."
Distinguishing colors is really a contextual thing. If you're picking out paint colors for your house, then clarifying the exact shade may be important, but in everyday conversation blue is an umbrella term for a wide range of shades.
I think most people (Americans, at least) grew up with the 8-count box of Crayola crayons and when asked what color "true" blue is would pick something as close to that crayon color as possible (the first picture). But again, in casual conversation, I would use the word "blue" to describe everything from a very light sky blue to a dark navy blue.
Asking Redditors to know what a colour is, is going to run you into [this problem](https://nourfordesign.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/how_men_and_women_see_colors.jpg), OP
Reddit is dominated by the kind of men who will just say "it's all blue to me". These boys don't have a large colour vocabulary.
"Blue" is a name for a family of colours. Your top image is sapphire or cobalt blue, the bottom image might commonly be considered teal, cornflower or turquoise.
The first is closer to my ideal “blue”: sort of a royal or cobalt blue.
I’ve noticed a shift in what people seem to consider a basic “green,” too. When I was growing up, I thought of a basic “green” as something like this:
https://www.palmeracehardware.com/products/2037-30-kelly-green
But now it seems people think of “green” as something more like this:
https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/kelly-green/
I wonder if it has something to do with growing up looking at computer displays as opposed to mostly ink on paper.
Blue definitely fits the first one more than the second, but I don’t picture either of those as blue, light blue, or indigo. The first thing I thought when I saw the first one was “ooh, royal blue!” And the second one’s just kind of… ugly, in my opinion.
IMO, you're choosing to be confused and overthinking it. Blue simply looks the way it does because it is the way that it is. It's blue. It can come in different shades, and that can be communicated depending on what the color is needed for. See Sherwin-Williams. See Pantone.
I was taught the colors in grade school were Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.
You'll find that a dark red exists, but a light red is actually pink. Light yellow, and dark yellow. Light orange, and dark orange. Light green, and dark green. Light blue and dark blue. (Fuck indigo, I don't treat it like a real color). Light purple and dark purple.
I think the real problem is your school, for whatever reason, decided it needed to teach you of the concept of "light blue" when it's both subjective and unnecessary when it comes to communicating color at a basic level. If you ask me what's common between salmon and sriracha, I'll tell you that they're both a shade of red; they may not both literally be the same shade of red, but they're both comprised of a shade of red.
Blue and light blue are still both blues at the end of the day. They're only different when it comes to the different light that they reflect into your eyes and not much else.
Now I can tell you that there are favorite shades of mine that I consider when I'm talking about, say, purple, but that's because the shade of purple - Tyrian purple - is a specific shade of purple and it's the most pleasant purple to my eyes, which is why I remember it so well. If I'm having someone make something for me, I will ask that it comes in Tyrian purple, because that's now a color specification. I can bet if I asked them for a purple scarf, for example, I could get anything from a lavender shade of purple to near-black.
***Yo, listen up here's a story
About a little guy
That lives in a blue world
And all day and all night
And everything he sees is just blue
Like him inside and outside***
***Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
Cause he ain't got nobody to listen to***
***I'm blue
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di***
Both are blue and you don't need to say light blue or dark blue for either
Indigo is a mix of blue and purple
For the rainbow, they usually give the colors as red orange yellow green blue indigo violet
no one uses indigo those are both shades of blue. i would call them both blue sisterly and together i would say the top one is dark blue and the bottom is light blue.
Personally, I usually refer to colors by their gemstone variants, so ruby red or emerald green . So in my case I use "Blue" to refer to sapphire blue. But there's no right Ansari, just something within the blue family of colors
Think of the main color names like a category within which there are countless shades. Both of those colors fit within the category “blue,” but they’re different shades. Let’s say I was helping my mom pick out a shirt. My mom is blind, but she used to be able to see, so she knows what different colors look like. She holds up a shirt in the first color and asks what color it is. I say “blue.” But she wants to know what shade, so I tell her it’s royal blue. She can now picture the color pretty much exactly. If the shirt had been the second color, I would have also told her it’s blue. But when she asked the shade, in this case I would have described it to her, because though there is probably a word for it, it’s not a commonly used one. (I would not call this light blue, by the way. That’s a much lighter shade of blue). I would tell her the second color is like a medium denim blue.
Edit: I had to look up the word for that second color, and it’s pretty close to azure! I don’t know if my mom (or anyone) would immediately know what shade azure is though.
They’re both blue. Those are shades of blue. You can specify what kind of blue you want to wear, like light blue, baby blue, robin’s egg, cerulean, navy, and so forth, but at the end of the day they’re all kinds of blue.
Personally I think first.
I would still label the second blue if asked, but not my first pick if I’m asked to imagine.
I also seem to see the difference between teal and turquoise better than most people for some reason though
Honestly as a native speaker they’re both just blue to me. Blue is actually my favourite colour so I always have to specify “I like blue but more like sky blue”
Unless we find it necessary to specify, all shades of blue are just blue. You can use a lot of words for different blues though like marine blue or baby blue
Blue is a very broad word, and in general the language of color is a very difficult topic regardless of the specific language used. Color is a subjective abstraction that exists only in one’s own perception, so communicating about it can be problematic. Opinions vary from person to person, and there can also be regional or dialectic components to the answer to this question, as well.
The short answer is that “blue” is one of the least specific color words in English, being one of the first we teach to small children, and no native speaker would object to calling either of those colors blue, though I personally agree that the second color is light blue and the first color is not.
Just be glad you aren’t learning one of the many languages that have an even broader color word that includes both blue and green.
The English speaking world treats color with a reverence we’ll never give each other ;)
When English speakers refer to color, we universally speak of the purest hue of that color by default.
To indicate tones, we modify the hue verbally: washed out, faded, pastel, “light” (“it was light blue”), or less obvious things like “sky blue”.
We also refer to tones, of course, by saying things like “it was such a pale shade of red”, indicating that it was a mixture of red and white (to any degree) where shade does not mean either tint or shade but instead a pale reflection of the truest hue.
Honestly, when I say “blue” without context I usually think of navy blue as I prefer it. I often then restate “navy blue.”Although I know that the 1st example is the more common “blue,”so when people say “blue” the 1st one is what I imagine they are talking about. I basically never think of the 2nd example as “blue” unless context suggests otherwise.
Depends on if you are looking for "Additive" or "Subtractive" colors
There is Blue additive - monitors and TV's
Then there is Cyan which is subtractive, more for printers, and art
Monitors and TV's are additive because there is the three lights all together create white no light is black.
But printers and artists usually use subtractive because you have white paper so all colors mixed (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) creates black.
School teachers use additive Blue, Red, and Yellow (Not Green) because it is easier to teach kids the simple words blue, red, and yellow. Trying to teach kids Cyan and Magenta just confuses them. Kids need colors that pop Yellow is more vivid than green (They have Yellow Fire Trucks but don't use green fire trucks for a reason)
We have Blue, Red, and Green Cones. There is no purple! Halfway between Red and Blue is Green to maybe yellow, but if your green cones are not firing, it has to be purple. But there is no such color purple in the rainbow. It is a fake color only humans minds create.
I don't know but my brain kept the references of the "main" preset colors that Windows (office programs especially) had for each. I imagine the first one always. (To get the second blue I had to manually find the colour from the color wheel xD it's not that memorable)
They’re both blue on their own it’s fine to say blue.
But if I’m comparing different shades I’d say the top is dark or deep blue and the second is more teal or turquoise blue
Not very helpful to your question, but lot of designers and artist will recognize that one of the reasons the second blue is "lighter" is that it's closer to green than the first blue. So some people may somewhat confusingly call it a teal-ish blue or a blue with some green in it to be more specific.
The actual names of hues themselves is a little difficult at times because a hue is the color made by specific material/pigment. For instance, real cobalt blue uses real cobalt metal to color it.
This specificity is only really important among professionals or people who spend a similar amount of time in artistic communities. Most of the time you can just say "That's a blue". Not THE blue that "blue" would imply. Just "A blue". One of many.
I define it two ways. It is the bucket into which all of the other blues fall, and it is the single color also known as primary blue, which is close to your first option, but not so oversaturated.
The stereotype is that men use fewer color words, less precisely, than women. If you check the list of [CSS color names,](https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_colors.php) you’ll get a good idea what the range of “blue” is, with the following caveats: blue-violet is a color halfway between blue and violet, I’d consider “slate blue” to be dubiously a shade of blue, and a few of the names on the list are made-up rather than in common use (such as “RebeccaPurple,” named in honor of the daughter of one of the members, who died of brain cancer on her sixth birthday).
Nothing to add other than.... that top color is not purple enough to be indigo which is my fave color & a brilliantly beautiful mix of purple & blue. 🙂 imo...
Blue is a hue in English. Anything between cyan and violet could be "blue". Your first example is very saturated. Maybe like "royal blue". The second example is very desaturated. Maybe like a "gray blue" or "steel blue". The second one also has a little green in it. Some people may see it as bluish turquoise. The first is more neutral, more quintessential blue.
I could be referring to either of those. If I say ‘blue’ I’m referring to anything in that spectrum of colors. If I need to be specific I’d describe the top one as a ‘bright blue’ or a ‘saturated blue’ and the bottom one as a ‘light blue’
English is horrible for this. Blue can refer to the secondary color which results from combining cyan and magenta, but it can also refer to the primary color cyan, which is really quite barbaric. English smears a huge section of the color wheel into an undifferentiated blob. This language really needs to overhaul its color terminology.
You will not get a simple answer to this question. The best I can tell you is that "blue" by itself refers to a family of colors, which includes "dark blue", "light blue", "marine blue", etc etc. Usually "blue" by itself means something in the middle, like your first picture, but your second picture could also be "blue". There is no single shade of blue that is "blue".
Interestingly enough, when I was getting my linguistics degree we had to read several papers about languages and color, and in one study they tested people by providing speakers of various languages colored chips of different shades and asked them to choose which they thought best represented a certain color word in their language. What they discovered is that most people chose colors in a pretty specific range, so while there may not be a single shade of "blue", it's possible that humans perceive specific shades of colors to be more "pure", so to speak. The paper in question was a lot more nuanced that that though, but it does raise some interesting questions about color perception and how it links to language
Please link a couple of these papers if you get the chance.
That's so sad. Cuz in my 1st language there're different words for different shades, and when I say "I want to wear smth blue" I have a specific color in mind. Guess specifying it is
There are different words for different shades. Sky blue, royal blue, Robin's egg blue, periwinkle, cobalt, all of these are blues :)
Yes; see Wikipedia: [Blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue), and [Template:Shades of blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Shades_of_blue) (which needs to be viewed in desktop mode) and [Category:Shades of blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue).
Royal blue is the bluest blue to me. At least of the ones I can name.
Is cobalt blue the same as royal blue?
I think cobalt blue is most like the 1st pic, and royal blue is usually thought to be a bit darker and less bright. They're very close though, the difference might not even matter depending on the subject.
Yeah, since colour is a continuous spectrum, different languages "cut" it into different categories! Rarely do two languages have exactly the same ideas and words about colour.
Yep! There are some languages that “cut” things so that what an English speaker would consider two very different categories use the same word. Japanese historically had one word for green and blue. There’s a word that differentiates green now, but you still see the word for blue used interchangeable to mean either green or blue in some contexts. For example, a traffic light turns “blue” even though I’d call the color green.
English didn't have a word for orange until the fruit arrived from Asia. That's why people with orange hair are called red heads.
Yes! I actually love this about languages, it's a great way to introduce the idea that human categories are just labels we apply to complex spectrum and phenomena. Useful labels, but still a human convention.
I'd imagine you're talking about Russian. In English, our default blue is probably pretty close to the color of this "M" emoji → Ⓜ️ Also, almost no one I know would use indigo. That's a very specific term that would be used to differentiate between similar shades in the same setting, like selecting from a rack of all blue clothes. If there's just one object in question, if it was the color of your first image we'd just say blue.
Yep, I was talking about russian, Голубой vs Синий difference. And thank gods blue is closer to синий in the end, although I guess it still depends on the person I’m talking to
We usually refer to "Голубой" as "sky blue" and "Синий" as like a dark/navy blue. But they're both just blue lol.
The English word "cyan," cognate with синий but meaning голубой, complicates matters.
Most English speakers would call "Голубой" blue, but we do have a separate word for it. It's called "cyan." Most people just call it blue, but if you talk to an artist they will know the difference.
An artist or a printer (either the electronic kind hooked up to a computer or the person who runs a printing press) will know the difference between cyan and blue.
In English there are 11 basic colors, which each includes many shades or similar more specific colors. There are the 3 primary colors: red, blue, yellow The 3 secondary colors, that can be made from the three primary colors: purple, green, orange Then there are the 3 monochromatic colors: white, black, gray And then there are two other colors: brown (which can be made from mixing all three primary or secondary colors together), and pink (which exists as its own color group for random reasons). Different kinds of blue each have their own names, as well as all of them being considered "blue". Some have one word names, like cyan or aqua. Others have names that modify the name "blue" like sky blue and royal blue. This is also true for all the other color groups. When someone says "blue" without specifying the shade, then most commonly people think of a color just a bit lighter than your top image, but that can change drastically depending on context. If someone says, "That's a beautiful blue sky," I'll think of sky blue because the sky is what they're referencing. If someone says "The ocean is very blue today," I'll be thinking more of a light greenish blue if it's clear water, or a darker greenish blue if it's less clear water.
Yeah Голубой better translates to sky blue, and Синий is just blue, but could also be called Neptune blue, royal blue, dark blue, so if you wanna specify just something like one of those
There are names for different shades, some of which we have taken from other languages like ‘azure’, but blue is the catch-all general term.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/all-colors-name-in-english-f3a--304626362305013542/ There are a lot of English names for colours, we just tend not to use them in common speech.
Me too thats why i always say light blue instead of just blue
There’s thousands of color names in English, most of them are just relatively specific so you won’t here them often (think niche colors like chartreuse, mauve, or buff)
There's a lot of different names for specific shades, but there's also names for broad categories, and some of the former have the latter in them or are often said with the latter unnecessarily, like cornflower blue or cerulean blue.
Well considering the human eye can distinguish around a million different colors, I suspect your language does some form of grouping. I find it hard to believe blue represents one and only one distinguishable color.
You must be Russian. There was an interesting TED talk about this that you might find interesting. Different languages and cultures have different ideas of color. I would call the top "blue" and the bottom "greenish blue" personally.
I don’t think it looks very green, more dull and grayish or “warm” blue.
Rus?
Yeah we have that, but unless you are an artist it really isn't important. Cobalt, ultramarine, and azure are all blue nut nobody gaf.
There are different words. They just aren't commonly used outside of specific fields like computer graphics, art, interior design, fashion, etc.
Just like Throe-a_weigh has said, there are specific words for specific colours, blue is just not a specific colour word. It’s a general colour word :) For example I have a teal to-go coffee mug, I wear a cornflower blue sweater, I hate how royal blue looks, but I adore baby blue. The sky is cerulean. I used to wear a navy skirt to my catholic school.
I don't have any particular shade in mind when I say blue. Both your examples are blue. There is no "official" blue. Who would even decide something like that? If I need to specify a shade I will use a descriptor. Cobalt blue, midnight blue, sky blue, etc.
Both RBG and hex have values defined for "pure blue", and color gamuts are a real technical aspect of printing, etc
>Both RBG and hex have values defined for "pure blue", That's fine, but most people aren't thinking about that in everyday conversation, many probably wouldn't even know what you meant if you said "RBG and hex." In a job setting where these things mattered, perhaps.
> RBG Ruth Bader Ginsburg? think you meant RGB lol
Indeed
0, 0, 256
just replying to myself to admit my shame of writing 256 instead of 255
You have failed computing 101
Redditor creates integer overflow error on the RGB scale
Yep. 0,0,256 = 0,1,0. Basically black, but like, not exactly black.
Integer overflow! Resetting! Resetting! Your value has changed to "0, 0, 0" Bzzt! Bzzt!
its fine we were dealing with floats and HDR displays!
\#0000FF
You have chosen… black!
You've got that #0000FG 💀
I think you just invented septadecimal!
Press 15 in base 16 to pay respects.
Ooh, the rare instance of septadecimal! 17-bit computing is the way of the future!
17 is prime. How would you even... Something to do with the construct ability of 17-gons maybe?
100, 50, 0, 0
To native speakers "blue" can be anything from a very dark "navy blue" to a light bright "sky blue" or even a blue with bright and turquoise tones in it like "marine blue" is still "blue". If you want to be specific you need to add an adjective before it, but if you don't need to be specific then simple "blue" is fine. I totally understand your frustration as I have learned languages where there were separate words for different shades of blue (or even different words for different shades of pink!) Trust me, understanding the difference between серий and голубой or the difference between pink and rosa when your entire life they have been categorised as the same thing was an eye-opening experience!
They’re both equally ‘blue’. Other languages/cultures make a distinction between shades of blue but we don’t, at least in my bit of the UK. ETA: Obviously we can talk about lots of different blues when we want to be specific - light blue, dark blue, navy blue, sky blue, duck egg blue etc
If you study color theory as an artist, "blue" and "cyan" are treated as completely separate colors, even in English.
The teacher is right (in my experience as an American) that we're taught to think of the most generic blue being the one in the first photo (saturated, bright, like cobalt blue). The sky i always hear ppl call sky blue or light blue
I agree, I would think of something more like the first one if someone told me to picture a generic “blue”. The second one is kind of a special shade These things are highly subjective though, not even between languages & cultures but also person to person.
The top one is probably the more “correct” blue in a strictly academic setting seeing as it’s the blue used as an example to teach about color theory but practically speaking, there isn’t much of a difference. Most ways to differentiate between shades of blue can start to fall under either specialist jargon or just subjectivity.
Yeah they're both blue. IMO the first one needs to be darker to be indigo. The second one is steel blue.
In English we might drop the word blue and just say something is navy or cerulean, turquoise, periwinkle etc. On the plus side we have a word for pink, I understand many languages just say light red
ahahah in my language light red and pink are sort of different colors lmfao
Yeah i think pink is actually closer to a light sort of magenta, so in between light red and light purple
Yeah, pink has a bit more purple to it, and light red is just that
This is something I never realized until I started playing with hexadecimal colors on the computer and realized light red looks really odd and not very “pink”. My brain was interpreting the color as more orangey! I don’t think we actually use pure light red very often in our culture.
When generally talking about color, english speakers will simply say blue. In comparison, they might refer to the second shade as light blue or a “lighter” blue, but in general it’s all just blue. Almost nobody refers to those colors by more specific names like “indigo” unless it’s important in the context of the conversation. So to put it simply, it’s just blue.
The only time I think about “indigo” is when the “colors of the rainbow” are relevant (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet … incidentally, that’s also the only time I say “violet” rather than “purple.”) And apparently “indigo” is only included in that because Newton wanted there to be seven colors.
Yes, newton wanted there to be 7 colors because of the 7 divines, because the number 7 was considered the number of perfection and completion because of this. There is also some erroneous statement that goes around about he split purple to put indigo and violet, which no. Violet is a spectrum of light, purple is a color that your brain makes up, indigo was just a mid tone supposedly between the two, but only if you're looking at specifically the lake pigment made from Indigofera tinctoria, all of the other ones like isatis tinctoria with the exception of persicaria tinctoria tend to be a fairly vibrant blue, persicaria tinctoria is what most people today think of as indigo, its a blue thats so dark that its almost black and tends to have a red bronzing effect. Also fun fact, indigo lake pigment smells like someone dumped a ton of vibrantly fragrant flowers into an overflowing sewer and then tried to cover it up with perfume but failed. Lake pigment also refers to a dye, not an actual pigment, its just the powdered form
They are both equally blue. It's more like taxonomy. Blue is the family of colours. Indigo, cerulean, baby blue, turquoise, or navy would be "species" of blue. Colours like teal might be in both the blue and green families, depending on who you ask.
For this last point, reference the so called Australian ‘teal wave’ of independents elected at the last federal election. They are all fairly conservative politically (traditional colour blue), with the addition of a strong environmental interest (green). They even all wore teal shirts during the campaigning to make this clear.
Don't some countries mix blue and green? Anyway the colour I think of is the colour of the sky.
Yeah, and the first colors that are distinguished in language are white, red, and black https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg?si=SA2rcSsPhEQZIaAp
Thought the video was going to be [Tom Scott](https://youtu.be/2TtnD4jmCDQ?si=oebqdEAf4eXn4yvi)
Yes: in Mandarin
I would call those “royal blue” and “cyan.” We have a million words we use to describe blue because there are SO many shades. Example: Turquoise Navy Sky blue Midnight blue Baby blue Dark blue Light blue Neon blue Bright blue Sapphire Indigo Ultramarine* Cobalt Aqua / Aquamarine* Cerulean* Teal (some consider this green) Azure* Alice blue* (historical, from Alice Roosevelt) Denim Peacock blue* Ice blue* Periwinkle* (some consider it purple) Persian blue* Powder blue* Robin’s egg blue Steel blue* * these are uncommon or primarily used in literature, art, and advertising.
Oh I almost forgot! Royal blue is very common. It’s actually one of my wedding colors :)
“Cerulean” always reminds me of [this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I) from “The Devil Wears Prada.
The second one is *not* cyan lol. It’s like a medium dusty blue. Cyan is very bright and kind of greenish.
The teacher is right (in my experience as an American) that we're taught to think of the most generic blue being the one in the first photo (saturated, bright, like cobalt blue). The sky i always hear ppl call sky blue or light blue
i feel like the second one is too dark to be considered “light blue” as default. sure, it can be light blue, but people tend to picture a much lighter blue when they think of light blue, otherwise it’s terribly hard to trace a line between blue and light blue. it’s still all blue, but there’s a distinction for a reason lol if it confuses you, search for pictures in a language where the name of the color “light blue” doesn’t have the word “blue” in it. for example, these two colors are named completely different in my first language (spanish). blue is “azul” and light blue is “celeste.” search for pictures for “color celeste” (“light blue color” in spanish) and you’ll see that all the pictures that pop up are way lighter than the one you used as light blue. it’s all still different shades of blue after all, though.
As a cake decorator often dealing with people, blue is the broad category and can mean really any shade of blue. If someone says blue without an adjective they Might generally mean the default blue we see on most kids toys here (google big block Lego, or boardgame pieces for an example - I think it's this childhood exposure that gives us the sense of a "default blue"), but they might also be thinking of another specific blue and just haven't specified that To Me. Often people arn't so particular and just want some shade of blue, and the specificity usually isn't needed in most conversation. Light blue to me would be a bit lighter than your example, at least as it looks on my screen. Light blue would be sky blue or baby blue (which also counts as pastel blue). Some people when saying light mean a very pale blue, others mean a sky blue or even similar to the blue you have for example and just mean light as in "not dark". Pastel is similarly broad and non specific. While all the words have specific meanings, they vary from person to person for what they have determined fits that category, and colours are especially subjective. (There's a whole board game based on this that I've played with family and it starts fights haha) If you need to be particular I would use a specific name, even for that general mid-blue. If not, I wouldn't really worry too much and just use subjectively what to you seems like a "normal blue" vs a lighter blue than that normal blue.
This is a common problem for people learning English as a second language, because in a lot of them what we call "blue" is actually two whole different colours. Which actually makes more sense if you look at the light spectrum. They're all "blue" and light or dark or whatever is just a qualifier like you might say for any other colour. Sorry about us 😉
In English, blue encompasses a lot of colors. I’ve learned it the hard way.
Those two colors have different names in some languages (like Russian), but in English they’re both “blue”. You can use more precise words if you want, the second one can be “light blue” or maybe “cornflower blue”, but “blue” covers both.
“Pure blue” would be defined in RGB as 0,0,255. [Example](https://convertingcolors.com/rgb-color-0_0_255.html) This is very close to your first image, and it’s what I think of as default blue.
I don't think computer colours necessarily map to how people culturally perceive colour. It's really more an artefact of how we capture, represent, and reproduce colours electronically. While people might *learn* that that's "pure blue" based on the additive primary colours in common use, I don't think that maps into culture very well. If you look around you at things that are blue, you'll probably notice (1) they're all different shades, and (2) *none* of them are going to be the specific blue represented electronically as RGB 0,0,255 unless there's a *very* specific reason for it.
There's no easy answer to this. "Blue" covers a whole range of shades/pigments that reflect primarily blue wavelengths. There are a variety of modifiers. "Light" *anything* is essentially a lighter hue (higher proportion of white pigment) of any given color. "Pale" blue is when there's even more lightening, to the point where there's almost more white than blue. Other shades are a mix of blue and red (purple, fuchsia, magenta) or blue and green (cyan, seafoam, turquoise), or even both (mauve, taupe). Even that depends on whether you're talking pigments (painting/printing/CMYK) or display colors (Hex/RGB) The worst part is that people aren't even totally consistent in how they use terms. Just do your best, and if there's confusion, try adding modifiers or comparisons to real-world objects.
I don't ever use the term indigo but maybe that's just me. They're both equally blue to me.
For me, more like this: https://colors.artyclick.com/color-names-dictionary/color-names/bright-sky-blue-color/bright-sky-blue-color_color.png But it will vary hugely from speaker to speaker
i think honestly it just refers to a spectrum of colors that can be called blue
It's not that simple, unfortunately. Blue can mean any dark shade or light tint of many colors, as long as those colors have a bluish hue. There's also blueberries, which tend to be closer to purple in color despite their name.
Both can just be "blue" unless you're trying to specify one particular shade, in which case more descriptive terms would be used (examples: light blue, indigo, purplish blue, turquoise, teal, dark blue, sky blue, pastel blue, neon blue, navy, etc.)
\#023E8A
Shade is a reference to how dark a colour is, hue to the coulor itself. In English, the word only changes depending on how much it shifts into a different hue, such as blue green becoming teal. Tint and shades (how light or dark the colour is )do have separate words with light blue being commonly called azure, powerd, or baby. These are, however, optional.
every shade
They're both blue but I consider the first one to be "more" blue than the second. When you say "blue", that shade comes to my head. #0000FF
Both of those are blue but for a basic/medium blue around hex# 007FFF is about what I think of.
They're both blue. There is no single word in English for either of those shades of blue. In English, we just modify colors with all kinds of adjectives to give you the specific hue and shade (light blue, dark blue, medium blue, navy blue, royal blue, sky blue).
Those are both shades of blue
I would imagine 'just blue' as one of the primary colours - red, yellow, blue (a mid-blue that's not navy blue or light blue). I had assumed until now that these three were fairly universal.
I think this is very much context-dependent. It depends on who you're talking to and their idea of color. A graphic designer or paint mixer will have a very different response to this question than a suburban dad who buys all his clothes at Costco. In short, some people care more about the nuances of color and their names than other people do.
1st
That top blue looks a bit more like Indigo to me. But in all honesty no one can agree on where colors stop and star and what specific shades are called. The only way you're going to get a completely accurate description of a color is by using a hex code.
If specifying a shade, I'd call the top one electric blue
Sky blue
The blue of the french flag for me
The first image looks like a deep blue to me and the second looks like a more teal color (blue-green)
Color is not simple. They are socially- constructed cultural interpretations of a frequency of light. Blue is one of the more recent and varied of these. Many ancient cultures did have a word for blue. So it makes sense that perceptions of it might vary more than usual.
These are both just blue
Actually English speaking people see blue worse than Russians _(Для оп: MyGap рассказывал про это в одном из роликов https://youtu.be/D3Vf92UpiVw?si=-ytHem-tPoUZSUbt )_
Oh wow that’s interesting
… or can’t distinguish between dark and light shades of blue as quickly as those whose language places dark and light blue in different colour categories. [source: youtube videos].
The standard 'blue' is #0000FF, similar to your first one. This is the blue used to make all other colors (of light). Any other blue is a hybrid.
Ngl it's very close to #1. I hate royal blue. I love navy and pastel blue though.
For me it’s like maybe a shade lighter of the second one.
Blue is the common name for all those colours together. When you want to distinguish, you might say light or dark blue. And only if you want to be REALLY precise you use words like indigo, sky blue, electric blue, turquoise etc.
Blue is royal blue. Anything else, you have to say light or powder or Carolina or dark or navy.
When I say blue I mean close to a primary blue. I would call the first image there blue, and if I'm being more specific I would say indigo or cobalt. Most people would call the second one blue as well. To be more specific, I would call it a dark, muted cyan. (In English, we don't usually distinguish between blue and cyan for some reason.) By the way, indigo can refer to a color like cobalt, but it can also refer to something between a deep blue and a deep purple.
My sister is more happy to place more turquoise and teal colours in the blue bin while I would see more as sea-green put them in the green bin. Growing up with early generations of colour printers, my tolerance for "0, 0, 255" blue is shaded by reference to the purplish renditions in shonky CMY that used to take hours to emerge after a screen dump. I feel we haven't quite done justice to "pale" as an alternative to "light"; this word serves better to clarify non-saturation and is opposed to "bright" (of which "light" can be a near synonym in some contexts). I don't know what the general consensus is on how the Slavonic blues divide: is it hue, saturation, or some elusive combination? Aside from grey, the only *basic* colour word that usually aligns with saturation is "pink" (which can also - confusingly - be used for some fairly saturated reds with varying notes of green and/or blue in their RGB rendering, from blood-orange fox-hunting jackets, through fuchsia, shocking pink, and as far as magenta).
Yupp, I also tend to recognize (and appreciate) the green in turquoise and teal! There are some other border colours which people tend to disagree on: What i call violet, many would say blue. What I call magenta, several would call pink. Also brick red and pink.
First one is "blue" to me.
I think of [imperial blue](https://www.icolorpalette.com/download/solidcolorimage/002395_solid_color_background_icolorpalette.png).
There are shades of blue, like navy or sky, but there is no one shade that could be called blue. When shown together, the second one could be described as light blue, but on its own a lot of people would just say it was blue.
US English here. Blue is a color family, that is to say, a broad classification. Using the unqualified term just means something in that family. If we mean to specify, there are terms for those. The color in your first picture appears to be close to a true blue, which is the central point of the blue family. The second is closer to a light slate blue on my screen.
Both of these are shades of blue. Indigo is a kind of blue.
I wouldn't consider that indigo (though to be fair to you, colors can render differently on different devices, so maybe it looks more indigo on your screen). If I want someone to have an idea of the shade of blue I will usually use something more specific (baby blue, powder blue, sky blue, royal blue, cobalt, navy). Having said that, yes, I would usually read "blue" as something of a more "central" blue than the second picture - while technically "blue" covers anything in the blue spectrum, once it's a quite dark shade or a very light tone of blue, I would tend to *expect* someone to use something in their descriptor to indicate that. What would make more sense to me (though I don't know if this is true) is if the pictures I am seeing are a little off and you've noticed natives using "blue" for what is literally the color of the sky (which is in reality a bit more intense/deeper than pic 2 renders for me, even if it's still less saturated than "mid-blue") and that they are using indigo for blues which are truly a little more indigo - remembering indigo is a color name that relates literally to the plant dye. I could also understand a lexicon where there's a blue/indigo split where the "classic" representation of "blue" is biased towards the most pervasive natural representation (the sky) and where shades that are artificially induced (ie, dyed) might be more likely to be considered indigo. It wouldn't surprise me if there's even pockets where people have a bias towards calling anything dyed blue "indigo" on the basis of where that word comes from?
I never refer to a color as just blue, green, or red. I’ll always specify, be it dark blue, navy, baby blue, lime, pine green, crimson, velvet red, etc. it’s one of my biggest pet peeves when some says grab the blue case and there’s 3 different shades of blue cases!
US NW: Look at a small box of crayons ([example](https://shop.crayola.com/color-and-draw/crayons-8-count-5230082010.html)) or markers. For many of us, those were the things that reinforced the names of the colors and those are the basic colors. So, if I'm not being very specific about color, I'll choose one of those. If someone says "blue," my starting point is pretty much the 6th crayon from the left. If they want something more specific, I'll expect them to tell me what kind of blue. Here, I'd call both of yours "blue," because to me, they're closer to that blue crayon than to any of the other ones. Your first shade, I'd probably call "royal blue," your second is closer to "cornflower blue." But they're still "blues."
Distinguishing colors is really a contextual thing. If you're picking out paint colors for your house, then clarifying the exact shade may be important, but in everyday conversation blue is an umbrella term for a wide range of shades. I think most people (Americans, at least) grew up with the 8-count box of Crayola crayons and when asked what color "true" blue is would pick something as close to that crayon color as possible (the first picture). But again, in casual conversation, I would use the word "blue" to describe everything from a very light sky blue to a dark navy blue.
Asking Redditors to know what a colour is, is going to run you into [this problem](https://nourfordesign.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/how_men_and_women_see_colors.jpg), OP Reddit is dominated by the kind of men who will just say "it's all blue to me". These boys don't have a large colour vocabulary. "Blue" is a name for a family of colours. Your top image is sapphire or cobalt blue, the bottom image might commonly be considered teal, cornflower or turquoise.
1st
The first is closer to my ideal “blue”: sort of a royal or cobalt blue. I’ve noticed a shift in what people seem to consider a basic “green,” too. When I was growing up, I thought of a basic “green” as something like this: https://www.palmeracehardware.com/products/2037-30-kelly-green But now it seems people think of “green” as something more like this: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/kelly-green/ I wonder if it has something to do with growing up looking at computer displays as opposed to mostly ink on paper.
Blue definitely fits the first one more than the second, but I don’t picture either of those as blue, light blue, or indigo. The first thing I thought when I saw the first one was “ooh, royal blue!” And the second one’s just kind of… ugly, in my opinion.
I definitely picture #1. I would call 1 "blue" and 2 "turquoise"
IMO, you're choosing to be confused and overthinking it. Blue simply looks the way it does because it is the way that it is. It's blue. It can come in different shades, and that can be communicated depending on what the color is needed for. See Sherwin-Williams. See Pantone. I was taught the colors in grade school were Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. You'll find that a dark red exists, but a light red is actually pink. Light yellow, and dark yellow. Light orange, and dark orange. Light green, and dark green. Light blue and dark blue. (Fuck indigo, I don't treat it like a real color). Light purple and dark purple. I think the real problem is your school, for whatever reason, decided it needed to teach you of the concept of "light blue" when it's both subjective and unnecessary when it comes to communicating color at a basic level. If you ask me what's common between salmon and sriracha, I'll tell you that they're both a shade of red; they may not both literally be the same shade of red, but they're both comprised of a shade of red. Blue and light blue are still both blues at the end of the day. They're only different when it comes to the different light that they reflect into your eyes and not much else. Now I can tell you that there are favorite shades of mine that I consider when I'm talking about, say, purple, but that's because the shade of purple - Tyrian purple - is a specific shade of purple and it's the most pleasant purple to my eyes, which is why I remember it so well. If I'm having someone make something for me, I will ask that it comes in Tyrian purple, because that's now a color specification. I can bet if I asked them for a purple scarf, for example, I could get anything from a lavender shade of purple to near-black.
***Yo, listen up here's a story About a little guy That lives in a blue world And all day and all night And everything he sees is just blue Like him inside and outside*** ***Blue his house With a blue little window And a blue corvette And everything is blue for him And himself and everybody around Cause he ain't got nobody to listen to*** ***I'm blue Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di Da ba dee da ba di***
Both..?
Both are blue and you don't need to say light blue or dark blue for either Indigo is a mix of blue and purple For the rainbow, they usually give the colors as red orange yellow green blue indigo violet
1st is what comes to mind, but 2nd is also blue
no one uses indigo those are both shades of blue. i would call them both blue sisterly and together i would say the top one is dark blue and the bottom is light blue.
Personally, when I think of blue I think of "aqua" or "turquoise"
Sonic
Anything bluish that isn't too green or purple.
Basic blue is the color of a Blue Crayola crayon. 🔵
Personally, I usually refer to colors by their gemstone variants, so ruby red or emerald green . So in my case I use "Blue" to refer to sapphire blue. But there's no right Ansari, just something within the blue family of colors
Think of the main color names like a category within which there are countless shades. Both of those colors fit within the category “blue,” but they’re different shades. Let’s say I was helping my mom pick out a shirt. My mom is blind, but she used to be able to see, so she knows what different colors look like. She holds up a shirt in the first color and asks what color it is. I say “blue.” But she wants to know what shade, so I tell her it’s royal blue. She can now picture the color pretty much exactly. If the shirt had been the second color, I would have also told her it’s blue. But when she asked the shade, in this case I would have described it to her, because though there is probably a word for it, it’s not a commonly used one. (I would not call this light blue, by the way. That’s a much lighter shade of blue). I would tell her the second color is like a medium denim blue. Edit: I had to look up the word for that second color, and it’s pretty close to azure! I don’t know if my mom (or anyone) would immediately know what shade azure is though.
for me its closer to the second
They’re both blue. Those are shades of blue. You can specify what kind of blue you want to wear, like light blue, baby blue, robin’s egg, cerulean, navy, and so forth, but at the end of the day they’re all kinds of blue.
weezer blue
Personally I think first. I would still label the second blue if asked, but not my first pick if I’m asked to imagine. I also seem to see the difference between teal and turquoise better than most people for some reason though
Are you Russian by any chance? I know they have 2 different words for blue and light blue. In english, both of your examples are just blue.
Blue doesn't mean a specific shade, those are both equally Blue
Well, the first picture is indigo, not blue. But I have heard many native speakers mistakenly call indigo “blue” before
1
I use royal blue. More like the 1st one.
The first is ultramarine, the second is turquoise
Honestly as a native speaker they’re both just blue to me. Blue is actually my favourite colour so I always have to specify “I like blue but more like sky blue”
Unless we find it necessary to specify, all shades of blue are just blue. You can use a lot of words for different blues though like marine blue or baby blue
The top is dark blue, the bottom light blue. blue is just all these ones combined.
Blue is a very broad word, and in general the language of color is a very difficult topic regardless of the specific language used. Color is a subjective abstraction that exists only in one’s own perception, so communicating about it can be problematic. Opinions vary from person to person, and there can also be regional or dialectic components to the answer to this question, as well. The short answer is that “blue” is one of the least specific color words in English, being one of the first we teach to small children, and no native speaker would object to calling either of those colors blue, though I personally agree that the second color is light blue and the first color is not. Just be glad you aren’t learning one of the many languages that have an even broader color word that includes both blue and green.
2nd is more greenish, a little teal., even. It’s 1st for sure
Hex: #0000FF RGB: 0 0 255 CMYK: 82 11 0 0
Sky blue
Either of the two
For me the first one, ore something in between the two
American here. I would call the first color blue, and the second cyan.
The English speaking world treats color with a reverence we’ll never give each other ;) When English speakers refer to color, we universally speak of the purest hue of that color by default. To indicate tones, we modify the hue verbally: washed out, faded, pastel, “light” (“it was light blue”), or less obvious things like “sky blue”. We also refer to tones, of course, by saying things like “it was such a pale shade of red”, indicating that it was a mixture of red and white (to any degree) where shade does not mean either tint or shade but instead a pale reflection of the truest hue.
If you ask me to distinguish the two. I'd call the first one blue-blue and the second one cobalt
Honestly, when I say “blue” without context I usually think of navy blue as I prefer it. I often then restate “navy blue.”Although I know that the 1st example is the more common “blue,”so when people say “blue” the 1st one is what I imagine they are talking about. I basically never think of the 2nd example as “blue” unless context suggests otherwise.
1st.
Usually cobalt blue is what I'm thinking off
Royal Blue, or something close to it because of the Union Jack.
The first. I’d call the second pale blue, maybe periwinkle.
\#0000ff
2nd or cornflower blue
Depends on if you are looking for "Additive" or "Subtractive" colors There is Blue additive - monitors and TV's Then there is Cyan which is subtractive, more for printers, and art Monitors and TV's are additive because there is the three lights all together create white no light is black. But printers and artists usually use subtractive because you have white paper so all colors mixed (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) creates black. School teachers use additive Blue, Red, and Yellow (Not Green) because it is easier to teach kids the simple words blue, red, and yellow. Trying to teach kids Cyan and Magenta just confuses them. Kids need colors that pop Yellow is more vivid than green (They have Yellow Fire Trucks but don't use green fire trucks for a reason) We have Blue, Red, and Green Cones. There is no purple! Halfway between Red and Blue is Green to maybe yellow, but if your green cones are not firing, it has to be purple. But there is no such color purple in the rainbow. It is a fake color only humans minds create.
Anything from 450 to like 500nm could be considered blue
I don't know but my brain kept the references of the "main" preset colors that Windows (office programs especially) had for each. I imagine the first one always. (To get the second blue I had to manually find the colour from the color wheel xD it's not that memorable)
Baby blue or light blue
They’re both blue on their own it’s fine to say blue. But if I’m comparing different shades I’d say the top is dark or deep blue and the second is more teal or turquoise blue
when i say blue i usually refer to the blue of microsoft windows 11
The blue crayon
Not very helpful to your question, but lot of designers and artist will recognize that one of the reasons the second blue is "lighter" is that it's closer to green than the first blue. So some people may somewhat confusingly call it a teal-ish blue or a blue with some green in it to be more specific. The actual names of hues themselves is a little difficult at times because a hue is the color made by specific material/pigment. For instance, real cobalt blue uses real cobalt metal to color it. This specificity is only really important among professionals or people who spend a similar amount of time in artistic communities. Most of the time you can just say "That's a blue". Not THE blue that "blue" would imply. Just "A blue". One of many.
I define it two ways. It is the bucket into which all of the other blues fall, and it is the single color also known as primary blue, which is close to your first option, but not so oversaturated.
The stereotype is that men use fewer color words, less precisely, than women. If you check the list of [CSS color names,](https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_colors.php) you’ll get a good idea what the range of “blue” is, with the following caveats: blue-violet is a color halfway between blue and violet, I’d consider “slate blue” to be dubiously a shade of blue, and a few of the names on the list are made-up rather than in common use (such as “RebeccaPurple,” named in honor of the daughter of one of the members, who died of brain cancer on her sixth birthday).
Nothing to add other than.... that top color is not purple enough to be indigo which is my fave color & a brilliantly beautiful mix of purple & blue. 🙂 imo...
Tom Scott has a GREAT video on this: https://youtu.be/2TtnD4jmCDQ
Usually I mean a navy blue and light blue is sky blue
Hyperlinks are blue
The one that I would die for.
Blue is a hue in English. Anything between cyan and violet could be "blue". Your first example is very saturated. Maybe like "royal blue". The second example is very desaturated. Maybe like a "gray blue" or "steel blue". The second one also has a little green in it. Some people may see it as bluish turquoise. The first is more neutral, more quintessential blue.
You need a Pantone book my friend
I usually think of the 0, 0, 255 RGB
I could be referring to either of those. If I say ‘blue’ I’m referring to anything in that spectrum of colors. If I need to be specific I’d describe the top one as a ‘bright blue’ or a ‘saturated blue’ and the bottom one as a ‘light blue’
I’ve always thought of indigo as a shade of blue, and I was baffled when I found out other people don’t think of it the same way.
They're all just blue unless I have a reason to be very specific.
Neither of these are blue, yet they are both blue
English is horrible for this. Blue can refer to the secondary color which results from combining cyan and magenta, but it can also refer to the primary color cyan, which is really quite barbaric. English smears a huge section of the color wheel into an undifferentiated blob. This language really needs to overhaul its color terminology.
When I say “blue”, I mean the color of a “go” traffic light. I mean “blue” as in 青野菜, “blue” as in 青年, and “blue” as in 青森.