Blues

How to spell blues

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce blues

What does blues mean?

1. nounA style of melancholy folk music originating among African Americans, marked by flattened notes and a recurring chord pattern.
2. nounA feeling of sadness, low spirits, or mild depression.

Blues in a sentence

• He learned to play the blues on an old slide guitar.

• She gets the blues every year when the long winter sets in.

• The festival featured blues artists from across the delta region.

• A brisk walk usually lifts him out of the blues.

Where does blues come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows directly out of the adjective 'blue', which English took from the Old French 'bleu', meaning the colour, a word that itself traces back to a Germanic root carried into French by the Franks. In English the colour blue became linked with low spirits as early as the 1600s, and the phrase 'the blue devils' described a gloomy, downcast mood. By the early 1800s that phrase had been shortened to 'the blues', meaning a spell of sadness or depression. In African American communities of the southern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this same name was given to a melancholy style of folk music built on flattened notes and a twelve-bar pattern, and from there 'blues' spread worldwide as the parent of jazz and rock. The persistent -s ending is what trips writers up, since the word looks plural but usually behaves as a singular idea, as in 'the blues is a feeling'.

How the word is built

• blue (the colour, from Old French bleu)
• -s (plural/collective noun ending)