Feeling Blue

The Definition

To be "feeling blue" means to experience a state of sadness, melancholy, depression, or low spirits. It describes a quiet, heavy kind of grief or dejection—the emotional equivalent of an overcast, rainy day where the vitality has been completely drained from the environment.

The Deep Dive

The phrase is a fascinating linguistic intersection of nautical mourning customs, classical mythology, and the deeply rooted psychological connection humans make between color and temperature.

  • The Nautical Custom of Mourning: The most prominent historical explanation for the phrase comes from the deep-water sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries. If a commercial merchant ship or a naval vessel lost its captain or a high-ranking officer during a voyage, the crew would signal their collective grief to the world before entering port. They would fly a solid blue flag from the mainmast and paint a distinctive, thick blue stripe along the entirety of the ship’s wooden hull. To see a ship "wearing blue" meant it was a vessel in active mourning. Over time, sailors who were grieving or downcast were said to be "carrying the blue" or "feeling blue."

  • The Blue Devils of Melancholy: Long before it became a maritime custom, the color blue was tied to dark psychological states through an Elizabethan phrase: the blue devils. Originating in the late 1500’s, "blue devils" were thought to be malevolent, invisible spirits that caused terrifying hallucinations during alcohol withdrawal or deep bouts of clinical depression. In 1781, playwright George Colman wrote a popular farce titled The Blue Devils, cementing the term in the public lexicon as a description for intense, dark mood swings. Eventually, the "devils" were dropped from the vernacular, leaving just the color behind to describe a low mood.

  • Chaucer’s Tears: The earliest recorded link between the color blue and emotional distress in English literature belongs to Geoffrey Chaucer. In his c. 1385 poem Anelida and Arcite, Chaucer describes a spurned lover weeping, noting that she wore blue garments to reflect her bruised, wounded heart and her "tearful, blue" state of mind.

  • The Physics of Emotion: In sociolinguistics and color psychology, blue is universally classified as a "cold color." When a human body experiences deep sadness, fatigue, or shock, the sympathetic nervous system can cause peripheral vasoconstriction—drawing blood away from the skin's surface and toward the core. This physical reaction can leave a person feeling literally cold and looking slightly pale or cyanotic. Therefore, "feeling blue" perfectly matches the physical sensation of a low-energy, chilled emotional state.

Fast Facts

  • The Birth of the Blues: The musical genre known as The Blues directly inherited its name from this idiom. Developed by African Americans in the Deep South in the late 19th century, the music utilized "blue notes" (dropped or flattened pitches) to convey the unvarnished pain, exhaustion, and structural oppression of post-emancipation life.

  • The Linguistic Inversion: Interestingly, while Western cultures link blue to sadness, ancient Egyptian culture viewed blue as the color of the Nile, representing fertility, rebirth, creation, and absolute joy.

References

  • Smyth, W. H. (1867). The Sailor's Word-Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms. Blackie and Son.

  • Ammer, C. (2013). The Dictionary of Clichés. Skyhorse Publishing.

  • Oxford English Dictionary. (2026). The Chromatic Evolution of Melancholy Metaphors and Nautical Vernacular.