Color Azure: Bright, cyan-blue colour

It is a pure chroma on the RGB color wheel halfway between blue and cyan. The complementary color of azure is orange.

• Azure is one of the national colors of Italy on its Coat of Arms. Nations which use tones of Azure in their flags include Argentina, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Namibia, Palau, San Marino, Somalia, Sweden, and Ukraine. The European Union uses a vivid tone of azure called royal blue (the web color royal blue) as the background color for its flag.

• The flag of the United Nations is a tone of azure called "United Nations Azure" or "United Nations Blue" (shown below). It is also the color of the helmets worn by the United Nations peacekeeping forces.

• In Poetry, azure is often used to represent or refer to the sky or Heaven. Azure is often used in France to describe the Mediterranean Sea.

The word azure comes from the Persian لاژورد lazhward. Lazhward was the name of a place. This place was famous for a kind of deep blue stone. Now we call this stone "lapis lazuli". It means "stone of Lazhward".

The word came to Old French by the twelfth century. The French used this word to talk about the colors of coats of arms. From the French the word came to the English. The first recorded use of azure as a color name in English was in 1374.

 

In heraldry, the word azure simply means "blue". Azure is said to represent Jupiter and sapphires.

It belongs to the class of tinctures called "colors". In engraving, it is sometimes depicted as a region of horizontal lines or else marked with either az. or b. as an abbreviation.

In addition to the standard blue tincture called azure, there is a lighter blue sometimes found that is called bleu celeste or "sky blue". Neither azure nor bleu celeste is precisely defined as a particular shade of blue, but azure is consistently depicted in a much darker shade.

• List of colors