Hue

How to spell hue

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hue

What does hue mean?

1. nounA colour or a particular shade or tint of a colour.
2. nounA loud public outcry or clamour, chiefly in the fixed phrase 'hue and cry'.

Hue in a sentence

• The designer chose a warm orange hue for the kitchen walls.

• The council raised a hue and cry over the sudden tax increase.

• As the sun set, the sky took on a deep purple hue.

• News of the factory closure prompted a hue and cry from the whole town.

Where does hue come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hue in the sense of colour descends directly from the Old English hiw (also spelled heow), which meant 'form, appearance, shape' and only later narrowed to the colour or tint of a thing. It belongs to a Germanic family that includes the Gothic hiwi, meaning 'appearance' or 'form', so the earliest idea was how something looked overall rather than its specific shade. Over the medieval period the word drifted toward our modern meaning of a particular colour or gradation of colour, and it was nearly archaic until painters and later scientists revived it as a precise term for the attribute that distinguishes red from green from blue. A quite separate word, the one heard in the legal phrase 'hue and cry', came instead through Anglo-French hu, a shout raised to summon help in pursuit of a criminal, and the two simply collapsed into the same spelling. Because hue sounds identical to 'hew' (to chop) and to the name Hugh, the spelling trap is choosing the right one of three by ear alone, and remembering that the colour word is the one with a plain -ue ending.

How the word is built

• hue (from Old English hiw: form, appearance, colour); a single unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like hue

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• whew: An exclamation used to express relief, tiredness, or astonishment, imitating the sound of an exhaled breath.