Aqua (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

for "

water Water (chemical formula ) is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as ...

") is a variation of the color

cyan Cyan () is the color between green and blue on the visible spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a predominant wavelength between 490 and 520 nm, between the wavelengths of green and blue. In the subtractive color system, or CMYK col ...

. The

normalized color coordinates Normalization or normalisation refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular. Most commonly it refers to: * Normalization (sociology) or social normalization, the process through which ideas and behaviors that may fall outside o ...

for the two

web colors Web colors are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web, and the methods for describing and specifying those colors. Colors may be specified as an RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format (a ''hex triplet'') or according to their ...

named aqua and cyan are identical. It was one of the three

secondary color A secondary color is a color made by mixing of two primary colors in a given color space. Additive secondaries Light (RGB) For the human eye, good primary colors of light are red, green, and blue. Combining lights of these colors produces ...

s of the

RGB color model The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three ad ...

used on computer and television displays. In the HSV color wheel aqua is precisely halfway between

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when ...

and

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combin ...

. However, aqua is not the same as the primary subtractive color named '' process cyan'' used in printing. Shaheed Island, Andamans, Bay, Turquoise water

The words "aqua" and "cyan" are used interchangeably in

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

, and especially

web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

, to refer to the additive secondary color "cyan". Both colors are made exactly the same way on a computer screen, by combining blue and green light at equal and full intensity on a black screen. Traditionally, that color, defined as #00FFFF in hex, or (0,255,255) in

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...

. The #00FFFF color code is called "cyan" in the RGB color but the

X11 color names In computing, on the X Window System, X11 color names are represented in a simple text file, which maps certain strings to RGB color model, RGB color values. It was traditionally shipped with every X11 installation, hence the name, and is usually l ...

introduced the alternative name "aqua" for #00FFFF in 1987. Later, W3C popularized the name by using it in the named color palette of

HTML 3.2 The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...

specifications.

Pale aqua

Displayed in the right-hand column is the color pale aqua.

References

Shades of cyan Shades of blue Shades of green Web colors {{color-stub

Pale aqua

See also

References