mauve

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   pale purple in color, often with a gray or pink tinge

   She chose a mauve scarf to complement the gray coat.

2. 2
   noun

   a pale purple color, often with a gray or pink tinge

   The evening sky faded from rose to mauve.

3. 3
   noun

   the first commercially successful synthetic purple dye, now called mauveine

   Perkin's discovery of mauve transformed the nineteenth-century dye industry.

Borrowed from French mauve ("mallow"), ultimately from Latin malva, because of the flower's purple color. The color name spread after William Henry Perkin accidentally produced the first commercially successful aniline dye in 1856; that dye is now called mauveine.

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