Aqua
- HEX
- #00FFFF
- RGB
- 0 255 255
- HSL
- 180° 100% 50%
- CMYK
- 100 0 0 0
Aqua or Turquoise?
Lighter and bluer than turquoise. On screens it is the same as cyan.
Language
Aqua is Latin for water. On screens it is exactly cyan, #00FFFF: the 16 basic HTML colors, taken from the Windows VGA palette, gave cyan a second name, aqua, and the web kept both. Cyan comes from Greek kyanos, dark blue enamel, the word Homer used for the dark brows of Zeus.
Design
Cyan is one of the three printing inks, with magenta and yellow, plus black: CMYK. Every full-color magazine photo is built from tiny dots of those inks that your eye blends. See optical-mixing.
Kin
- Magenta: Its partner ink in four-color printing
- Yellow: The third printing primary, with cyan and magenta
- Blue: Homer's kyanos, the root of cyan, meant dark, not sky blue
Sources
- W3C, HTML 3.2 Reference Specification (1997), the 16 color names
- Etymonline, 'cyan'
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.