Settled Gloam Teal

The past participle of settle, to come to rest — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as stabilized after a process. Settled green, settled brown: moderate saturation combined with optical permanence. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside steady and composed.

Old English glōm, twilight-or-dusk. As a color modifier, gloam implies a twilight-and-half-light-and-fading quality, the visual register of Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-gloam hand-twilight-and-half-light-and-fading Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-and-Orkney gloamed-and-twilight-and-fading surfaces under Scottish-Border-and-Hebridean-and-Orkney long-northern-twilight-and-blue-hour gloaming-and-twilight light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to dusk and shade in usage.

Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.