cyan

Definition: Blue-green: primary colour of subtractive mixing; secondary colour of additive mixing. * It is the complementary to red.
Strange, but blue
Cyan comes from the ancient Greek 'kyanos' which, as an adjective - we are told - means 'dark'. Ancient Greeks, as Goethe was the first to point out, did not have a word for 'blue'. Were the old Homeric yarn-spinners just colour-blind? Or did they just 'see' their skies as 'dark'? Note: kyanos, the noun, referred to the stone lapis lazuli, which is a beautiful sky-blue - from which we obtain the present meaning of cyan.

Related Terms: CMYK

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