Royal blue describes both a bright shade and a dark shade of azure blue. It is said to have been invented by millers in Rode, Somerset, a consortium of which won a competition to make a dress for the British queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Traditionally, dictionaries define royal blue as a deep to dark blue, often with a purple or faint reddish tinge.
By the 1950s, many people began to think of royal blue as a brighter color, and it is this brighter color that was chosen as the web color "royal blue" (the web colors when they were formulated in 1987 were originally known as the X11 colors, since the World Wide Web did not come into operation until 1991). The World Wide Web Consortium designated the keyword "royalblue" to be this much brighter color, rather than the traditional darker version of royal blue.
Read more about Royal Blue: Royal Blue in Human Culture
Famous quotes containing the words royal and/or blue:
“Not to these shores she came! this other Thrace,
Environ barbarous to the royal Attic;
How could her delicate dirge run democratic,
Delivered in a cloudless boundless public place
To an inordinate race?”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)