There are several words hue but I’m going to pick on two.

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The most common is when referring to various shades of color when they are referred to as different hues.

Almost as long as the word has been considered an English word people would have recognized this meaning, although around Shakespeare’s time it began appearing in dictionaries as a “hard word” so must have been less common then.

The word appears in documents as old as 1100 years ago making it Old English but at that point it also had a second meaning that has since fallen out of use. Different forms, shapes, and even species were described as being different hues.

As an Old English word hue has Germanic parentage and in Swedish The Oxford English Dictionary says its sister word hy means “skin” and “complexion.”

The OED goes on to compare the word to the Indo-European chawi meaning “hide” as well as “skin” and “complexion.”

This makes me think that our use of the word hue to discriminate fine differences in color grew out of our ancient discrimination of people’s faces.

The other use of the word hue is in the phrase hue and cry.

This use is not as old an etymology but perhaps it’s more primal.

I checked a few modern citations of the phrase hue and cry to find that public discussion of our dependence on oil is described as a hue and cry, as well as the controversy surrounding the arrest of Roman Polanski.

Hue and cry was, 700 years ago and more, a legal term.

It came to English with the French of the Norman conquest.

Imagine yourself attending a medieval market day. A hungry bystander grabs a chunk of cheese or something and makes a run for it.

By law at the time the whole crowd at the market day were required to grab the guy and bring him to justice.

Same thing if a vagabond snuck in at night to steal a chicken, all the neighbors had to jump to and tackle the thief.

But to alert the locals to the need to react one had to raise the alarm and the legal term for this was the hue and cry.

Now imagine yourself realizing that someone was stealing your chicken.

Your first reaction might be an inarticulate grunt, and then you’d start yelling.

It’s suspected that the Old French word hu evolved based on that first inarticulate grunt.