Meaning
Feel depressed, melancholy or low in spirits; 'I've had the blues all week'. Informal and mild. The same noun gave its name to the blues, the African-American music that voices exactly that mood, so the phrase and the genre constantly echo each other. Informal, sympathetic register; from casual 'feeling blue' to clinical-adjacent 'a bad case of the blues'. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The colour word carries the sadness: etymonline dates 'blue' meaning low-spirited to about 1400, possibly from 'blue' as livid, a bruised heart, and the noun 'the blues' for depression to 1741. The expression is widely linked to the older 'blue devils', a term for melancholy - and originally for the terrifying hallucinations of delirium tremens - familiar enough that George Colman staged a farce called Blue Devils in 1798. Early American evidence of the verb phrase includes John James Audubon writing in 1827 that he 'had the blues', Thoreau's Walden (1854) and Charlotte Forten's diary in 1862. The musical sense is documented from 1912, when Hart Wand's 'Dallas Blues' became the first copyrighted blues composition and W.C. Handy's 'Memphis Blues' appeared the same year; etymonline calls the genre name 'possibly c. 1895, officially 1912'. Whether the genre took its name from the mood word or partly from the 'blue note' is still debated, the note itself being attested only from 1919.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a case of the blues
- feel blue
- get the blues
- the Monday blues
Usage Examples
- He had the blues all winter, so his daughter moved in until spring.
- Whenever the orchestra plays that street-corner set, half the audience gets the blues and loves it.
- She has been fighting the blues since the shop closed, and counselling is helping.