Word.ws English Dictionary

blue lights

blue lights is the plural of blue light.

blue lights is the third-person singular simple present indicative of blue light.

Meaning of blue light

Noun

blue light (countable and uncountable, plural blue lights)

  1. (historical) A mixture of chemicals (including nitre, sulfur and antimony) used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for night-time signaling and general illumination.
    • Blue lights, or blue fire, is a preparation in which zinc and sulphur, or sulphur alone, are used. The particular colour is communicated by the zinc and sulphur.1828, Samuel Frederick Gray, The Operative Chemist, page 499
  2. (US, colloquial, historical) A New England federalist, who opposed the Anglo-American War of 1812; (loosely), a federalist.
    • The “Blue-Light Elder” knows ’em well; / Says he, “That’s Banks — he’s fond of shell; / Lord save his soul! We’ll give him” — well, / that’s “Stonewall Jackson’s Way.”1862, John Williamson Palmer, Stonewall Jackson's Way
  3. (countable) A flashing light, usually fitted to an emergency vehicle.
    • Blue-light escorts were provided where possible to get engineers to the stranded GTR trains to reset the software.2019 October, Roger Ford, “Power failure highlights specification confusion”, in Modern Railways, page 26
  4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue, light.

See all 5 meanings of blue light

Questions about blue lights

What is blue lights the plural of?
Blue lights is the plural of blue light.

Words near blue lights in the dictionary

  1. blue light discos
  2. blue light special
  3. blue light specials
  4. blue lighted
  5. blue lighting
  6. blue lights
  7. blue line
  8. blue line process
  9. blue line processes
  10. blue lines
  11. blue link

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue lights (page history and authors); blue light (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “blue lights.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blue_lights. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.