From azure to cerulean, how some of the most fashionable shades of blue got their names
The Devil Wears Prada explained there’s big money in leveraging names of blue hues, some of which evolved across centuries and continents
It’s not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis; it’s cerulean.
That pivotal monologue in The Devil Wears Prada explained how haute couture created a million-dollar industry based on that most specific shade of blue.
Cerulean derives from Latin caeruleus, encompassing “blue, dark blue, blue-green”, suggested to be a result of a dissimilation of caelulum (changing one of the “l” sounds to “r”), the diminutive of caelum (“heaven, sky”) – the Latin word caeruleus was applied by Roman authors to the sky, the Mediterranean and, occasionally, to leaves or fields. The word entered English as cerulean in the 1660s, to mean “sky-coloured, sky-blue”.
Another colour term in English is also closely associated with the sky: azure, also for sky-blue, but which more specifically describes the colour of a cloudless sky or denotes “the unclouded sky”. Azure is also used to refer to a particular shade of blue pigment or paint made of powdered lapis lazuli.
A deep-blue metamorphic rock composed of an aggregate of lazurite, pyrite, and calcite, lapis lazuli has been prized since antiquity as a semi-precious stone for its intense colour. It has been used as jewellery, inlay and pigment.
The earliest use of the name in English dates back to the early 15th century Middle English, a direct borrowing from Medieval Latin lapis lazuli. Lapis means “stone”; lazulī is the genitive singular form of lazulum, which derives from Arabic lāzuward, ultimately coming from Persian lājvard/lāzhward, denoting the specific stone and its blue hue.
Some accounts suggest this originates in a local place name, Lajward, in Turkestan, where the stone was collected, as mentioned by Marco Polo. Certainly, lapis lazuli was mined from the 7th millennium BC in locations such as Shortugai, the northernmost settlement of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and the Badakhshan region (both in modern-day northern Afghanistan).
As the valued semi-precious stone started being traded and exported, its name spread and adapted. The Arabic form was maintained quite faithfully in medieval Greek λαζούριον and medieval Latin lazurius/lazur/lazulus.