• enPR: blo͞oz, IPA: /bluːz/

1. plural form of blue

blues

1. (usually, in the plural, informal) A feeling of sadness or depression.

   Synonyms: blueness

   I've got the blues today.

   The blues have hit her hard, and she won't get out of bed.

   • 1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London, Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC ↗:

     If we had been allowed to sit idle we should all have fallen in the blues […]

   1. (singular or plural, informal) One's particular life experience, particularly including the hardships one has faced.

      Your blues is just like mine.

      Your blues are just like mine.

   2. (singular or plural, informal) The negative emotional state produced by a particular action, occupation, experience or idea.

      I've got the lonely man's blues.

      If you work here long enough, you'll have the butcher's blues just like me.

2. (music genre) A musical form, African-American in origin, generally featuring an eight-bar or twelve-bar blues structure and using the blues scale.

   Many great blues musicians came from the Mississippi Delta region.

   A large portion of modern popular music is influenced by the blues.

   1. (music, always singular) A musical composition following blues forms.

      My next number is a blues in G.

3. A uniform#Noun made principally of a blue fabric, and especially a full dress uniform thus colored.

   Coordinate terms: camos, fatigues, greens, khakis

   They marched in their dress blues.

   • 2007, Jason Isbell, Dress Blues:

     You never planned on the bombs in the sand
     Or sleeping in your dress blues.

4. (drug slang) Any of various blue pills sold on the street, mimicking the appearance of prescription pain killer tablets but often laced with fentanyl that leads to overdose deaths (see opioid epidemic).

• Italian: malinconia, paturnie
• Portuguese: tristeza
• Spanish: murria (colloquial)

• French: blues
• German: Blues
• Portuguese: blues
• Russian: блюз

• German: Blues
• Portuguese: blues
• Russian: блюз

1. Third-person singular simple present indicative of blue

In reference to the ancient Roman and medieval Byzantine racing faction, a calque of Latin venetus or factio veneta ("the sea-blue faction") and gkm Βένετοι.

1. (informal) Any of several sports teams whose uniform is predominantly blue, such as:
   1. (historical) The chariot-racing faction of the Roman circus and Constantinopolitan hippodrome that wore blue.
      • 2002, James Allan Stewart Evans, The Age of Justinian..., p. 38 ↗:

        'Constantinople adopted the follies, though not the virtues of ancient Rome,' wrote Edward Gibbon, 'and the same factions which had agitated the circus raged with redoubled fury in the Hippodrome.' Gibbon's judgment was that what produced the 'redoubled fury' in the Hippodrome was senseless hooliganism, and even though the Blues and Greens could be politicized upon occasion, they had no coherent aims, religious or political. Gibbon's successors had alternative suggestions, the most persistent of which has been that the Blues were supporters of religious orthodoxy and the Greens of Monophysitism.

   2. (Australian rules football) Carlton Football Club.
   3. (rugby league) New South Wales.
   4. (soccer) Birmingham City FC.
   5. (soccer) Everton FC.
   6. (soccer) Chelsea FC.
   7. (soccer) Manchester City FC.