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:
“An Englishman, methinks,—not to speak of other European nations,—habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud of it. But an American—one who has made tolerable use of his opportunities—cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of man in these respects.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This side of the truth,
You may not see, my son,
King of your blue eyes
In the blinding country of youth,
That all is undone,
Under the unminding skies....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)