Earnest Drear Ruby

Old English eornost, seriousness, zeal. Used as a color modifier since the nineteenth century for hues that read as committed but unshowy — the working blues of denim, the deep greens of Quaker meetinghouses. Sits in the bold-and-quiet corner of the grid, slightly less luminous than resolute and slightly less institutional than imperial.

Old English drēor, gore-and-sorrow. As a color modifier, drear implies a bleak-and-cheerless-and-sorrowful quality, the visual register of Brontë-moorland-and-Hardy-heath-drear hand-bleak-and-cheerless-and-sorrowful Brontë-moorland-and-Hardy-heath-and-Wuthering drear-and-bleak-and-cheerless-and-sorrowful surfaces under Brontë-moorland-and-Hardy-heath-and-Wuthering rain-swept-and-low-cloud-and-empty-vista Yorkshire-and-Wessex-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to bleak and gloom in usage.

From the Latin ruber — simply, red. The gemstone is a chromium-tinged corundum, harder than anything in nature except diamond, and so saturated that a fine Burmese pigeon's blood ruby at auction outpaces a comparable diamond by weight. The color borrows the gem's confidence: a clear, glassy red without the brown of garnet or the blue of crimson.