/hjuː/
[noun] A particular shade or variety of a colour, or the quality of a colour that makes it different from others. The word can also refer to a general character or type of something.
The Old English word for colour secretly meant 'appearance' or 'form' first — the idea of colour came later.
The word 'hue' comes from Old English 'hīew' or 'hēow', which meant not simply colour but something closer to 'appearance', 'form', or 'beauty'. This is a subtle but important distinction — the early sense was about how something looked overall, not specifically about its colour. The word described a visual impression in the broadest sense, and only gradually narrowed its meaning to focus on colour specifically.
The Old English 'hīew' descends from Proto-Germanic '*hiwją', which carried similar meanings of shape, form, and appearance. This same root gave rise to related words in other Germanic languages, such as Old Norse 'hy' (colour, complexion) and Gothic 'hiwi' (form, appearance). The connection across these languages shows that the original concept was about visible quality — the way something presents itself to the eye — rather than colour as a precise scientific category.
As Old English developed into Middle English after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the spelling settled toward 'hewe' and then 'hue', and the meaning quietly shifted. The broader sense of 'appearance' began to fade, and the word attached itself more firmly to the idea of colour. By the 14th century, writers like Chaucer were using 'hue' in ways that sound recognisably modern — describing the colours of flowers, faces, and fabrics with the word we still use today.
What makes 'hue' especially interesting is how it survived the great French invasion of English vocabulary. After 1066, Norman French words flooded the language, and many native English words for abstract or refined concepts were pushed out or replaced. Colour-related vocabulary was particularly affected — words like 'colour' itself, 'scarlet', 'azure', and 'vermilion' all arrived from French and Latin. Yet 'hue' held on, perhaps because it occupied a slightly different space, referring to the quality or character of a colour rather than naming a colour outright.
In modern English, 'hue' is used both literally and figuratively. Literally, it is a technical term in colour theory, referring to the pure spectral quality of a colour — what makes red 'red' and blue 'blue', separate from its brightness or saturation. Figuratively, it appears in phrases like 'of every hue', meaning of every kind or variety, echoing that original Old English sense of general appearance or character. The word also appears in the famous phrase 'hue and cry' — though this is an entirely different 'hue', borrowed from Old French 'huer', meaning to shout, and has no etymological connection to the colour word at all.