hīw

Hīw is Old English, from Proto-Germanic *hiwją, meaning appearance, form, color, or beauty. The word was broad: it described how something looked in its entirety — its shape, its coloring, its general aspect. A person's hīw was their complexion, their appearance, their visible character. The word held shape and color together, inseparable, the way a face holds its features and its coloring as one thing.

Middle English hew or hue began to narrow. The word lost its broader meaning of form and appearance and concentrated on color. By the sixteenth century, hue primarily meant the quality of color — the attribute that made red different from blue, yellow different from green. The word shed its body. The appearance became purely chromatic. Form fell away. Only color remained.

In modern color theory, hue is one of three attributes of color, alongside saturation (intensity) and value (lightness/darkness). Hue is what most people mean when they say 'color' — the position on the color wheel, the name of the color family. The Munsell color system (1905) and the HSL model (hue, saturation, lightness) in digital design both use hue as a fundamental axis. The Old English word for general appearance is now a precisely defined parameter in a mathematical model of color.

The phrase 'hue and cry' — meaning a loud public outcry — comes from a completely different etymology: Anglo-French hu e cri, from Old French huer (to shout). The two words are homophones in modern English but have no etymological connection. Color and shouting share a sound but nothing else.