A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
sepia
Sepia is a warm dark brown, and the pigment behind the word is cuttlefish ink. The ink sac of the animal was dried, ground, and treated to make a drawing ink and a watercolor pigment that came into wide use in the late eighteenth century. It is also the name of the photographic tone produced by a chemical treatment of a print, which is where most people meet the word now.
Etymology
The word is Greek for the cuttlefish and it is still the scientific genus name for the animal, so the color, the ink, the tone, and the creature are one word. Cuttlefish and cuttlebone entries cover the animal, whose English name comes from an entirely separate Old English root.
Notes
Photographic sepia toning was not done for looks. Converting the silver in a print to silver sulfide made it far more stable, so a toned photograph resisted fading and atmospheric attack much better than an untoned one, which is why so many surviving nineteenth-century prints are brown. The association of the color with age is therefore backwards: They are brown because someone was trying to make them last.