Art & MusicGreek → English
Cyan
/ˈsaɪən/noun
A greenish-blue colour, and one of the three subtractive primaries used in printing.
The Greek roots
κύανος
kýanos
dark blue enamel, lapis
Literally: “dark blue stone”
Follow a root:κύανος5 words
The story of the word
κύανος named a material before it named a colour: a dark blue glass paste or lapis lazuli, used as inlay on Mycenaean daggers and on the frieze of a palace in the Odyssey. The Homeric adjective κυάνεος is applied to hair, eyebrows and storm clouds, which is why translators argue over whether it means blue or simply very dark. The precise printing sense is twentieth-century, arriving with four-colour process work. Cyanide got its name from a different direction, through the pigment Prussian blue.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
cyanidecyanotypecyanobacteria
In a sentence
The proof came back with a cyan cast across the sky.