A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cinereous
Cinereous means ash-gray, and it is used mostly by ornithologists and botanists, where it describes a specific dull gray with a slight warm cast rather than a cool or a blue one. The cinereous vulture, the cinereous harrier, and the cinereous tit all carry it in their names.
Etymology
The word comes from the Latin for ashes, and it is the same root that gives cinerary, meaning of an urn for ashes, and incinerate. It belongs to a whole shelf of color words that the descriptive sciences kept and everyday English dropped: ferruginous means rust-colored, fuscous a dark brownish gray, testaceous brick-red, glaucous a pale blue-green with a bloom on it, and ochraceous yellow-brown. They persist because a bird description needs to separate a dozen browns.
Notes
The cinereous vulture of Eurasia is among the largest flying birds in the world, with a wingspan approaching ten feet. Ash Wednesday is dies cinerum in Latin, the day of ashes, from the same word.