A.Word.A.Day --solferino

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solferino

PRONUNCIATION:

(sol-fuh-REE-no)

MEANING:

noun: Purplish red color.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Solferino, a village in northern Italy, where the Battle of Solferino was fought on June 24, 1859, resulting in forty thousand casualties in a single day. The color was named so because the dye of this color was discovered shortly after the battle, and supposedly the color represented how the battlefield appeared after the bloodshed.
The immense suffering Henry Dunant witnessed in the Battle of Solferino inspired him to campaign leading to the founding of the Red Cross.

NOTES:

Another color named in this manner is magenta (after Magenta, Italy), whose dye was discovered shortly after the Battle of Magenta (June 4, 1859).

USAGE:

"Next season we will be drenched in solferino, their having exhausted rose, magenta and fuchsia in recent years."
Frances Cawthon; Most Kids Don't Need to Know; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Jun 16, 1986.

See more usage examples of solferino in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Money often costs too much. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

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