turquoise (n.)

Turquoise is a blue-green stone, and since the nineteenth century a colour as well. The name comes from the Old French turqueise, Turkish, in the phrase pierre turqueise: the Turkish stone.¹

The stone was not Turkish. The finest of it was mined in Persia, and Europe knew it because Venetian merchants bought it in Turkish markets and the overland routes ran through Ottoman territory.¹²

So the name records the way it came rather than where it came from. The colour was named after the stone in the 1850s, and the colour is now what most people mean by the word: a country’s name, on a paint chart.¹

The ring was set with turquoise.