"color," Old English hiw "color, form, appearance, beauty," earlier heow, hiow, from Proto-Germanic *hiwam (cognates: Old Norse hy "bird's down," Swedish hy "skin, complexion," Gothic hiwi "form, appearance"), from PIE *kei-, a color adjective of broad application (cognates: Sanskrit chawi "hide, skin, complexion, color, beauty, splendor," Lithuanian šyvas "white"). A common word in Old English, squeezed into obscurity after c.1600 by color, but revived 1850s in chemistry and chromatography.

"a shouting," mid-13c., from Old French hue "outcry, noise, war or hunting cry," probably of imitative origin. Hue and cry is late 13c. as an Anglo-French legal term meaning "outcry calling for pursuit of a felon." Extended sense of "cry of alarm" is 1580s.