means A pale purple color, somewhere between lilac and lavender, with a soft pinkish-violet cast.

from From French mauve, the name of the mallow plant (Latin malva), whose flowers wear just this shade. The word leapt into fame in the 1850s when a young chemist, while trying to synthesize quinine, accidentally produced the first aniline dye — a brilliant purple he named 'mauveine,' which set off the modern synthetic-dye industry and a Victorian craze for the color.