Eburnean: the ivory white whose name shares a Latin root with ivory
Eburnean is a warm off-white, hex code #FFFFEE, RGB 255, 255, 238. It is the colour of ivory, and the two words share one Latin root. One came into English straight from Latin, the other took the long way round through French, and they ended up side by side meaning the same thing.
The colour and the code
Colour reference sites such as ColorsWall list eburnean as #FFFFEE. In RGB that is full red, full green and blue just below full, which tips pure white very slightly toward yellow. On a screen it reads as white with a hint of cream. Paint makers use the name too: the colour-matching service MyPerfectColor lists a shade called Eburnean from the brand Burger, code Y574W.
One Latin word, two English ones
The 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary traces eburnean to the Latin eburneus, from ebur, ivory, and defines it as “made of or relating to ivory”. Look up ivory in the same dictionary and you find the same root. Ivory comes from the older English ivori and the French ivoire, which go back to the Latin eboreus, made of ivory, from ebur, eboris. Webster adds a comparison with the Sanskrit ibha, elephant, and a cross-reference: “Cf. Eburnean.”
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So the everyday word and the rare one are relatives. Ivory lost its Latin shape on the way through French and became ordinary. Eburnean kept the Latin and stayed learned, the kind of word a poet or a doctor reaches for.
Where the word turns up
Poets did reach for it, in its variant form eburnine. Walter Scott used it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, first published in 1805. In the sixth canto a lady lies reclined in her night-robe “And, pensive, read from tablet eburnine / Some strain, that seemed her inmost soul to find”. An ivory writing tablet, in other words, only grander.
Doctors kept the root alive in a less romantic way. Webster lists eburnation, a medical term for a condition in which bone or cartilage becomes unnaturally dense and “come[s] to resemble ivory”. It also records eburnification, the conversion of a substance into something with the look of ivory. Both words describe things turning eburnean.
A name for a shade
As a colour name, eburnean has always lived in ivory’s shadow. A Dictionary of Color by A. Maerz and M. Rea Paul, the 1930 reference that set out to record practically every colour name in use in English, does list eburnean. It lists it only as a pointer to ivory, the name everyone actually used.
That is still roughly where it stands. Today it turns up mostly on hex-code sites and, now and then, on a paint chip. The colour on the chip is the colour of ivory. What eburnean adds is the Latin, and the reminder that the plain English word came from the same place.