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teal is an aristocratic English word for the color shown below.

Most people whose parents owned only zero or one residential properties (like my parents) and who were fluent in English before they became adults would say, "bluish green" or "greenish blue".

FIGURE WALL OF TEAL

What word or phrase would a Russian person use for this color if their parents owned zero or one house, but not two house, three houses, et cetra?

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  • 3
    Samuel, native English speakers don't necessarily agree on colour names. and I don't see why Russians should be different. Colour names are partly linked to biological sex (X chromosome). The XKCD colour survey shows that women discriminate between turquoise and teal; which men tend to lump them in with blue. Apr 29 at 8:39
  • 1
    When talking about "Teal candidates" in Australian politics, is the colour translated, or just transliterated? Apr 30 at 2:41
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    @AndrewGrimm: Australian politics is not a big topic in Russian media, but I could find at least one article that did translate it: regnum.ru/news/3594174.html. They do translate "teal organization" too.
    – Quassnoi
    Apr 30 at 4:08
  • What does the number of houses owned have anything to do with it? That's just weird, also in English I would think. Is that how you differentiate between aristocrats and other people? Also what makes you think it is even an aristocratic color? With a quick search I couldn't find any relation between teal and aristocracy.
    – Ivo
    May 1 at 7:59
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    The picture posted above is pixelated and doesn't represent a true teal. See it here: simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_(color) , as well as a lot of other shades of blue/green below with their names.
    – CocoPop
    May 1 at 11:38

4 Answers 4

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When I was born, my parents owned zero houses. I would call this color бирюзовый (literally, "turquoise"). As far as I understand, it's another English word for "teal".

I own more than one house, so I asked some of my children what they would call this color. Two of them answered бирюзовый as well, while another two answered голубой и немного зелёный. I have a hunch, though, that the latter answer has more to do with their language command rather than with their parents' real estate property ownership status.

Jokes aside, in modern Russian-speaking societies, people's vocabulary correlates little, if at all, with their personal wealth.

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  • While I'd say бирюзовый is definitely the most accurate here (and likely the most common), I'd personally add лазурный (lit. azure) to this. One who has a more bumped up vocabulary of colors could say кобальтовый (lit. cobalt) (source: asked around the house too). However I can see how whether these names apply or not can be subjective between different color perceptions.
    – Vym
    Apr 30 at 10:33
  • I'm pretty sure кобальтовый is used for a dark blue color, not for teal. Apr 30 at 22:29
  • @Vym: you might want to post it as an answer. Thank you!
    – Quassnoi
    Apr 30 at 22:32
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I didn't fully understand how owning a house related to the question, but I'll answer anyway. As a kid, I discovered the color teal as "цвет морской волны" after an argument with a friend about what color the Statue of Liberty was (it was blue in real life, but green in the Madagascar cartoon, and we, having adopted polar opinions, compromised on teal). Wikipedia seems to back me up on this one, even though the overall color differentiation is a bit perplexing.

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    That's probably even better than бирюзовый, +1. How many houses did you say your family owned?
    – Quassnoi
    Apr 30 at 16:38
  • @Quassnoi two, a flat and a low-cost summer house. I guess dividing people by income would be more appropriate in this entire case, really, and then we're lower middle class. Apr 30 at 16:52
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    that was just a slight quip (not at you). I don't really think it matters in any Russian-speaking country.
    – Quassnoi
    Apr 30 at 17:20
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    The Statue of Liberty isn't and has never been blue. It was originally coppery and developed a green patina: newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/…
    – CocoPop
    May 1 at 11:35
  • You asked somthing like, "How is owning a house related to the question?" In the United States of America, the words used by the working class (paid less than 30 pairs of socks per hour) are very different from the words used by people who graduated from private (not public, or government funded) universities such as Harvard and Yale. Most russian-to-English dictionaries are restricted to polite speech of sophisticated persons. I wanted to know what word a person who owned 0 or 1 pieces of real estate would use for the color teal. I wrote about socks per hour b/c of inflation in US currency. May 27 at 11:49
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Yes, «цвет морской волны» (sea-wave colour), mentioned in another answer, is perfectly correct, but it's quite often used when we're talking about something beautiful (for example, some lavish garment or luxury car; you know, a posh term for a posh thing). For ordinary things of this colour, I prefer to use the adjective «сине-зелёный» (a mixed blue-green colour. That being said, it's not necessarily a 50/50 mix — it can just as well be used for bluish green and for greenish blue).

But I disagree with the name «бирюзовый». This word is translated into English as turquoise, and turquoise is certainly not the same as teal.

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The problem is about the color naming, because colors in cyfral era have numbers. Teal color have an exact number #008080 or sRGB (0, 128, 128), so you can't post picture with some smear of paint. So, i guess this color is important because it needs to standardize profiles of screens. But in Rus there is no word for definitely this color, but color sites use names: сине-зеленый or цвет окраски птицы чирок. All others names like бирюзовый, аквамарин,цвет морской волны and others are not definitely correct.

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  • You should really think about writing in Russian. This is a good answer (from what I understand), but it would be so much more effective in your native language. Alternatively, you could write it in Russian and then translate it with DeepL so that it makes sense in English. Instead of three minuses, this response could and should have three plusses.
    – CocoPop
    May 4 at 13:51
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    синий цвета яиц странствующего дрозда is my new favorite color
    – Quassnoi
    May 4 at 19:04
  • @Quassnoi звучит, конечно, смешно, но не я придумывал и переводил с английского по кальке), однако, в магазине красок на банке будет номер цвета и написано подобное название. По-хорошему, цветовой оттенок зависит как от характера освещения, вида окрашенной поверхности и от субъективного восприятия, поэтому без стандартизации в названиях и чисел никуда. Да и глаз обывателя всех этих оттенков не различит, это могут сделать только профессионалы с тренированным зрением или откалиброванная техника+профессионал. May 4 at 20:17

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