An etymological tricolor: red, white, and blue

Today, Americans celebrate their brave declaration of independence from British rule on July 4th, 1776 with plenty of red, white, and blue, the colors of its star-spangled banner.

As a nickname for the flag of the United States, the red, white, and blue is found by 1853. But what about those individuals words red, white, and blue? Let’s have a look at their origins, whose ancients roots make the US’s 242 years as a nation this year look ever so young.

Red

Red is found in Old English (as red or read), recorded in early glosses of the Latin flavus (golden), fulvus (tawny), and ruber (red).

While the English red is rooted in a Germanic base (cf. German rot), it has cognates across the Indo-European languages, including Latin’s ruber, Greek’s erythros, Sanskrit’s rakta, Irish’s rua, and Czech’s rudy—the latter which looks like ruddy, a word indeed related to red.

The definition of red from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reads like a little poem:

Designating the colour of blood, a ruby, a ripe tomato, etc., and appearing in various shades at the longer-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, next to orange and opposite to violet…

White

White is also founded in Old English, first recorded (as hwit or huit) in the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, describing two angels garbed in white.

White is also a Germanic word with deeper Indo-European origins: the Proto-Germanic *hwitaz looks back to the Proto-Indo-European *kweit- (white, shine), which also produces wheat. “Shiny” Indo-European cognates have been identified in the likes of Sanskrit, Avestan, and Old Church Slavonic. 

Again, the OED offers a lovely lemma for white:

Of the lightest colour possible, that of milk or freshly fallen snow…

Blue

As far as our tricolor is here concerned, blue is the outlier. It’s attested in Middle English, around 1300, in a religious text describing “blue cloth” (or blu) along green ones.

Blue is borrowed from the French bleu, which originally meant “livid, pale, leaden, or bruised.” Livid, as “furious,” first meant “dark bluish,” the jump apparently on the grounds on the pale countenance of an upset person.

Via an earlier Germanic root (*blæwaz), the French bleu is ultimately grounded in the Proto-Indo-European *bhel- (shine, flash, burn), which went on to name various greens, yellows, grays, and blacks (a derivative) in its daughter forms, along with loads of other non-color words from blind to flame. The Latin flavus, which we saw above in red, is also from *bhel-.

The OED does not disappoint in its definition of blue:

Of a colour of the spectrum intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or deep sea on a clear day.

Happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans, at home and abroad! If you’re interested in other color etymologies, check out orange, purple, and sepia in my archives.

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