glaucous

glaucous

English

WOTD – 16 February 2010

Etymology

From Latin glaucus, from Ancient Greek γλαυκός (glaukós, “blue-green, blue-grey”), 1670s.[1] See Irish glas.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈɡlɔː.kəs/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈɡlɑ.kəs/, /ˈɡlɔ.kəs/
• Rhymes: -ɔːkəs

Adjective

glaucous (comparative more glaucous, superlative most glaucous)

1. (color) Of a pale green colour with a bluish-grey tinge, especially when covered with a powdery residue.

   glaucous colour:  

   • 1955, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita:

     I realised I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium […]

   • 1994, Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing:

     […] inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands.

   • 1997, David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Kindle edition, Little, Brown Book Group:

     Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent.

2. (botany) Covered with a bloom or a pale powdery covering, regardless of colour.

Derived terms

• glaucous gull
• glaucous sedge
• glaucous-winged gull

Related terms

• subglaucous
• glaucoma
• glauconite

Translations

of a pale green colour with a bluish-grey tinge

Bulgarian: сивозеленикав (sivozelenikav) French: glauque (fr) Italian: glauco (it) Portuguese: glauco (pt)

Romanian: glauc Russian: серо-зелёный (sero-zeljónyj), сизый (ru) (sizyj) Spanish: glauco (es)

covered with a bloom or a pale powdery covering, regardless of colour

Bulgarian: мъхест (bg) (mǎhest)

French: pruiné (fr)

See also

• Appendix:Colors

References

1. “glaucous” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2019.