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:
“You know, he wanted to shoot the Royal Family, abolish marriage, and put everybody who’d been to public school in a chain gang. Yeah, he was a idealist, your dad was.”
—David Mercer, British screenwriter, and Karel Reisz. Mrs. Dell (Irene Handl)
“Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)