Art & MusicGreek → English
Sepia
/ˈsiːpiə/noun
A reddish-brown pigment made from cuttlefish ink, and the brown tone of old photographs.
The Greek roots
σηπία
sēpía
cuttlefish
Literally: “cuttlefish”
Follow a root:σηπία2 words
The story of the word
σηπία was the animal, and the animal makes the colour: the ink sac of the cuttlefish yields a warm brown that artists used for wash drawings from the Renaissance onwards. English had sepia for the creature by the 1560s and for the colour by the 1820s. Photographers toned prints with it because the sulphide compound resists fading better than plain silver, which is the reason so many surviving nineteenth-century photographs are brown and why the filter is still called sepia.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Italian → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
cuttlefishsepiolite
In a sentence
The album was full of sepia portraits of people nobody could name any more.