From the English color word, used as a modern word name with nature and style associations.
Blue as a given name is deceptively ancient in spirit, even if its use as a first name is largely modern. The word itself descends through Old French *bleu* from a Germanic root, entering English after the Norman Conquest to describe the color associated with sky, sea, divinity, and royalty across virtually every human culture. In ancient Egypt, blue was the color of the gods; in medieval Europe, it adorned the robes of the Virgin Mary; in Chinese tradition, blue-green porcelain carried imperial prestige.
As a symbolic color, blue has never carried a single fixed meaning — it holds both melancholy and serenity, distance and depth, freedom and fidelity simultaneously. Blue began appearing as a given name in the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, part of the nature-and-color naming movement that also produced names like Indigo, Sky, and River. It remained a rarity until 2012, when Beyoncé and Jay-Z named their daughter Blue Ivy Carter, transforming the name overnight into a cultural touchstone.
Blue Ivy's subsequent Grammy Award win — making her one of the youngest Grammy recipients in history — gave the name a particular kind of stardust. Beyond celebrity association, Blue has genuine appeal as a name that is utterly gender-neutral, internationally pronounceable, and evocative without being ornate. It belongs to a growing family of single-syllable names — Sage, Wren, Jet, Lake — that parents choose for their clean, unencumbered quality. Blue says everything and nothing at once, which is, perhaps, exactly the point.