A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
celadon
Celadon is a pale gray-green, the color of a lichen-covered wall or of the glaze on Chinese and Korean stoneware, where a trace of iron fired in a low-oxygen kiln comes out somewhere between jade and water. The word names both the color and the pottery. Longquan in eastern China and the old Korean kilns are its two great sources.
Etymology
The color is named after a fictional shepherd. In a French pastoral romance called L’Astrée, begun in 1607 and enormously popular, the lovelorn hero Céladon goes about in pale green ribbons, and the character was fashionable enough that his name became the name of the color. The author had lifted the name from Ovid, where two men called Celadon each appear just long enough to be killed in the sentence that introduces them, and the Greek word underneath it means noisy.
Notes
Two competing accounts are on record: that the word is a corruption of Saladin, who sent forty pieces of the ware to the Sultan of Syria in 1171, and that it comes from Sanskrit words for green and stone. Neither has displaced the shepherd. Chinese potters called the glaze mì sè, mystery color. The mineral celadonite is named from the same source.