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Webster 1913 Edition

Noun.

[AS.

bleó

bleóh

Complexion; color; hue; likeness; form.

[Archaic]

For him which is so bright of

blee

Lament. of Mary Magd.

That boy has a strong

blee

of his father.

Forby.

blee ‎(countable and uncountable, plural blees)

(rare, usually poetic) Colour, hue.
- 1931, Padraic Colum, "Before The Fair" in Lascelles Abercrombie, New English poems: a miscellany of contemporary verse never before published:
  [...] "Live," "live," and "Here," "here," the blackbird / From the top of the bare ash-tree,/ Over the acres whistles / With beak of yellow blee. [...]
- 1920, Anonymous, "To Marie" in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse:
  When the breeze from the bluebottle's blustering blim/Twirls the toads in a tooroomaloo,/And the whiskery whine of the wheedlesome whim/Drowns the roll of the rattatattoo,/Then I dream in the shade of the shally-go-shee,/And the voice of the bally-molay/Brings the smell of stale poppy-cods blummered in blee/From the willy-wad over the way. [...]
- 1885, Sir Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, vol. 1:
  [...] Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy [...]
- 1850, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
  Then the captain, young Lord Leigh, with his eyes so grey of blee, — Toll slowly.
Complexion.
Form, texture, consistency.
- 1898, Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Heptalogia:
  [...] I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings / Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee [...]
General resemblance, likeness; aspect, appearance, look.
- Robert Forby
  That boy has a strong blee of his father.

From Middle English blee, ble ‎(“colour, hue”), from Old English blēo, bleoh ‎(“colour, hue, complexion, form”), from Proto-Germanic *blīwą ‎(“colour, blee", also "light, glad”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰley-, *bʰlew- ‎(“light, pleasant, fair (of weather)”). Cognate with Scots ble, blee, blie ‎(“colour, complexion”), Old Frisian blī, blie ("colour, hue, complexion"; > North Frisian bläy), Old Saxon blī ‎(“colour, hue, complexion”), Old High German blīo(h) ‎(“colour, hue”), blīo ‎(“metallic lead”) (German Blei), Danish bly ‎(“lead”), Icelandic blý ‎(“lead”). Perhaps related to Old English blīþe ("joyous") (whence blithe). See also bly.