Open Flock Teal

Old English open, unobstructed — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues that read as airy or uncrowded. Open blue, open green: moderate saturation combined with optical spaciousness, the slight visual breath of a hue that doesn't crowd the surface it covers. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside clear.

Latin floccus, tuft-of-wool. As a color modifier, flock implies a tuft-of-wool-and-flocked-paper quality, the visual register of Victorian-flocked-wallpaper-and-Tudor-flocked-velvet hand-applied-and-tufted flocked-wallpaper-and-velvet flock-and-tuft surfaces under Victorian-flocked-wallpaper-and-Tudor-flocked-velvet interior-decoration light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to fluff and tufted 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.