A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
glaucous
Glaucous means a pale blue-green or gray-green, and in botany it carries a second, more specific meaning: covered with a fine waxy bloom that gives that color and rubs off under a thumb. A plum, a grape, a blue spruce needle, and a cabbage leaf are all glaucous in this sense. The bloom is a real structure, a layer of wax crystals that reduces water loss and sheds rain.
Etymology
The word is Greek and named a color the Greeks used for the sea, for olive leaves, and for eyes. It is usually translated as gray-eyed or bright-eyed, though what the Greeks meant by the color is argued over, since they applied it to things that are not the same color as each other. The medical term glaucoma is from the same root, for the appearance of the eye.
Notes
It belongs with cinereous, ferruginous, and fuscous in the set of Latin and Greek color words the descriptive sciences kept when ordinary English let them go. The glaucous gull of the high Arctic is named for the pale gray of its back, which is unusually light for a large gull and visible at a distance.