Gules

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Gules

In heraldry

Heraldry

Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of devising, granting, and blazoning Coat of arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms....
, gules (pronounced with a hard 'g') is the tincture

Tincture (heraldry)

In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to blazon a coat of arms....
with the colour red

Red

Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 625?740 Nanometer....
, and belongs to the class of dark tinctures called "colours". In engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass engraving are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustra...
, it is sometimes depicted as a region of vertical lines or else marked with gu. as an abbreviation.

The term gules derives from an Old French

Old French

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In heraldry

Heraldry

Tincture (heraldry)

In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to blazon a coat of arms....
with the colour red

Red

Engraving

Old French

Old French was the Romance languages dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300....
word goules or gueules meaning "throats" or referring to the mouth of an animal (whence comes the English gullet). The mouth and throat are red, hence the transfer of meaning.

For many decades, heraldic authors have believed that the term may have arisen from the Persian

Persian language

name=Persian|nativename=|pronunciation=[f??r'si]|image=|caption=Farsi in Perso-Arabic script |states= Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain....
word gul "rose" (coming to Europe via Muslim Spain or brought back by returning Crusaders) , but according to Brault there is no evidence to support this derivation.

In Polish heraldry

Polish heraldry

The history of Polish heraldry is an integral part of the history of the Szlachta, the Polish nobility....
, gules is the most common tincture of the field. Through the sixteenth century, nearly half of all noble coats of arms

Coat of arms

A coat of arms, more properly called an armorial achievement, armorial bearings or often just arms for short, in European tradition, is a design belonging to a particular person and used by them in a wide variety of ways....
in Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian Enclave and exclave, to the north....
had a field gules with one or more argent

Argent

In heraldry, argent is the tincture of silver , and belongs to the class of light tinctures, called "metals". It is very frequently depicted as white and usually considered interchangeable with it....
charges on them.

The Gules tincture is said to represent the following:

Of jewels, the ruby
Ruby

A ruby is a pink to blood-red gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum . The red color is caused mainly by the presence of the element chromium....
Of heavenly bodies, Mars
MARS

In cryptography, MARS is a block cipher that was IBM's submission to the Advanced Encryption Standard process. MARS was selected as an AES finalist in August 1999, after the AES2 conference in March 1999, where it was voted as the fifth and last finalist algorithm....

(The planet Mars is further associated with the metal iron in traditional alchemical/occultistic lore
Classical planets in western alchemy

Alchemy in the Western World and other locations where it was widely practiced was allied and intertwined with traditional Babylonian-Greek style astrology; in numerous ways they were built to complement each other in the search for occult ....
)

Gules

See also