indigo
- 1A purplish-blue color, sitting between blue and violet.
The dye left the wool a uniform indigo after several soakings.
At dusk the harbor water shifted from gray to a soft indigo.
Note
Named for a dye before it named a color: Latin indicum, from Greek indikón, "Indian dye", from the word for India, which makes indigo a doublet of Indic. English first spelled it indico in the 16th century, and the modern spelling settled in the 17th. As a color noun it takes adjectives freely, as in the "velvety indigo" of a night sea in Harold Bindloss's The Dust of Conflict (1907).
- 2Having a deep purplish-blue color.
The artist chose an indigo backdrop to set off the pale portrait.
His indigo jacket stood out against the snow.
- 3A blue dye obtained from plants such as the indigo plant or woad, or a similar synthetic version.
Traditional dyers extracted indigo from leaves left to ferment for days.
The vat held enough indigo to color several hundred yards of cloth.
Note
The word does not care where the dye came from. It covers both the plant product, taken from the indigo plant or from woad, and synthetic dyes of the same color. That is why a phrase like natural indigo is a real distinction, not a redundancy. Used for particular dyes or kinds of dye it is countable, and the plural has two accepted spellings, indigos and indigoes.
- 4A plant from any of several genera, such as Indigofera, grown as a source of blue dye.
They cultivated indigo on the plantation chiefly for the dye trade.
She grew indigo along the fence for its slender flowering stems.
Note
Common names stretch the word well past a single genus. False indigo is Amorpha, wild indigo is Baptisia, and indigo bush covers Psorothamnus and Dalea. Only Indigofera carries the name in its scientific label as well. When precision matters, name the genus, because a plant called some kind of indigo is not necessarily the one dyers grow.
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Origin
First recorded in the 16th century (as 'indico', with the modern spelling from the 17th century), it came from Spanish 'índigo', Portuguese 'endego', or Dutch 'indigo', all from Latin 'indicum' ('indigo'). That in turn came from Ancient Greek 'indikón' ('Indian dye'), from 'Indía'. It is a doublet of 'Indic'.