Periwinkle

There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable.

Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some point.

One such non-monosyllabic shade is periwinkle.

The name elicits a soft, light mix of blue and purple. It looks like this:

Periwinkle is sometimes known as lavender blue, light blue violet, pastel blue, or pastel purple blue.

Though now entrenched in our palettes, periwinkle did not join the Crayola family until 1949. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, periwinkle did even not enter English usage as a color descriptor until 1922.

The Crayola version of periwinkle leans a little more into the blues and greys than the traditional hue seen above:

How did a color garner such a bizarre nomenclature in the 20th century?

As is often the case round these parts, the answer is nature.

The word “periwinkle” has adorned a species of flowering plant in Modern English since at least the early 1500s. Native to central and southern Europe, Vinca minor is often called common periwinkle, small periwinkle, lesser periwinkle, or dwarf periwinkle. In the United States, you might be more familiar with another name: myrtle or creeping myrtle.

Still, why “periwinkle?”

The word arrives from the Middle English pervinkle, itself a diminutive of parvink or pervink. These words came from the Old English perwince or pervince, which potentially stemmed from the Latin pervincire. This term means “to entwine or bind,” composed of the roots per (thoroughly) and vincire (to bind, fetter).

This ancient name makes sense, as periwinkle not only forms pleasing, star-shaped flowers, but also intricate mats that can suffocate large swaths of ground.

So, the color came from the pretty flower.

On a November 2024 episode of Jeopardy!, contestants faced a category called “Shades of Blue.”

The $2000 answer was “‘P’ is for this shade of blue, also the name of a tiny sea snail.”

The correct answer was, of course, “What is periwinkle?”

Having never heard of this lilliputian sea snail, I expected to see a critter with a pleasing pastel shell. Instead, these cute dudes appeared:

Native to the northeast Atlantic Ocean, Littorina littorea – aka the common periwinkle – sports no blue or violet.

What gives?

The etymology of this animal displays another wonderful accident in the English language. The emergence of the common periwinkle as a name happened circa 1520, just a couple of decades after the plant’s dubbing. The snail’s sobriquet, however, arrived from the Old English pinewincle. That word likely derives from the Latin pina, meaning “mussel” and the Proto-Germanic winkil/the Proto-Indo-European weng, which denote “to bend, curve.” This word’s journey through Middle English is a mystery. Though this animal’s usage of “periwinkle” has a different origin, it’s possible that the timelines being so similar allowed scientists of the time to merge by mistake the slightly different pinewincle – however it sounded in Middle English – with the name of the plant that had taken hold in the previous decades, even though they had nothing to do with one another.

The English language, where flowers, snails, and crayons can be the same thing!