Warm Nave Teal

Old English wearm, of moderate heat — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as containing red, orange, or yellow undertones. Warm gray, warm white: not necessarily a temperature, but the optical impression of a slight red-orange shift. Sits across the crisp and neutral buckets.

Latin navis, ship. As a color modifier, nave implies a long-cathedral-central-aisle quality, the visual register of Romanesque-and-Gothic-cathedral hand-built central-aisle nave-and-clerestory-and-vault architectural surfaces under Gothic-and-Romanesque clerestory-and-stained-glass light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to apse and aisle 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.