Linguistic Wonders Series

Mauve the Manifest
John Algeo
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Georgia

Where do new words and new uses of old words come from? In some cases we know exactly; in others, not at all and can only guess. Examples of both extremes are the words mauve and mullet.

Mauve is the product of serendipity and imagination. The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) first record of the word’s use is from 1859. yourDictionary.com defines it as "a moderate purple, violet, or lilac color" and adds that it is also "a dyestuff that produces a mauve color." The term is a loanword from French, in which it means "the mallow plant" or the color of its flowers.

Mallow is a good Old English word borrowed from Latin malva, which is the etymon also of French mauve. So mauve and mallow are siblings, both names for the botanical species called Malva sylvestris "woody or wild mallow." Mallow is not very common today, either as a thing or a word, except in the combination marshmallow. That word has been in English since Anglo-Saxon days (when its Old English form was mersch mealwe) as the name of a plant related to the mallow.

In the late nineteenth century (the OED’s first citation is 1884), the term was applied to a confection originally made from the root of that plant, but now from corn syrup, albumen, and gelatin. And of course, the word also has metaphorical use for something soft, gooey, and sentimental. But all that’s only the dull stuff.

The term mauve for the color was coined by a young chemistry student named William Perkin. In 1856, when he was eighteen years old, Perkin was fooling around in a London laboratory trying to analyze the molecular structure of quinine, a valuable natural product that was then the only known treatment for malaria. Perkin’s instructor, who wanted to find a way to produce cheaper synthesized quinine, had him experimenting with aniline, a highly toxic substance. The experiment didn’t work out; instead of getting a substitute quinine, Perkin came up with a purplish powder. That was the serendipity.

Most chemists would have tossed the purple stuff away and started over. But instead Perkin fooled around a bit more with the powder to see what he could make of it. What he made was an unusually attractive purplish dye, which he called by the French term mauve. And he went on to develop it as the first commercially marketed aniline dye. That was the imagination.

Perkin’s mauve was not an immediate success: his colleagues ridiculed it as "purple sludge." But then fortuitously Queen Victoria wore mauve at her daughter’s wedding and Eugenie (wife of Napoleon III, Empress of France, and a royal fashion plate) thought mauve matched her eyes. Consequently, mauve became the modish tint of the haut monde. The story of Perkin’s serendipity and imagination is told in a recent book, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, by Simon Garfield (Norton, 2001).

But the term and the color continued to develop meanings and associations. In 1926, Thomas Beer published a study of the 1890s entitled The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century, in which an epigraph defined mauve as "just pink trying to be purple." So mauve comes to suggest fin de siècle world-weariness, pretensions, and fashionable posturing.

We know all about mauve; its history is manifest. Mullets are something different.