bokeh means A subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of an image projected by a camera lens. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 89 out of 100.
bokeh is pronounced /ˈbəʊ.kə/.
Why “bokeh” is a great word
BOKEH — [Noun] The aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus areas of an image rendered by a camera lens. Its name is a learned borrowing from Japanese 暈け (boke, "blur"), the nominalized form of 暈ける (bokeru, "to blur"); the spelling 'bokeh' with a terminal -h was introduced to guide English pronunciation, coined in the March–April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine by editor Mike Johnston. Unlike "blur" (a general term for a lack of sharpness) or "depth of field" (a technical property describing a sharp range), bokeh is the intentional, subjective character of visual absence. It is the transformation of distant streetlights into perfect, shimmering orbs; the gentle, aqueous smear of a crowd behind a solitary face; the rendering of a background forest into a watercolor wash of muted green—a minor alchemy where optical defect becomes a grammar of mood.
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Japanese 暈(ぼ)け (boke, “blur”), the nominalized form of 暈(ぼ)ける (bokeru, “to blur”).
The terminal -h, absent in the romanization boke, is a pronunciation guide so that it is not pronounced as /boʊk/ as it would be under standard English orthography. Contrast karate and karaoke, which have undergone sound changes.
The term has been used since at least 1996, with the spelling bokeh introduced by editor Mike Johnston in the March–April 1997 issue of Photo Techniques magazine, Johnston writing “it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable”.
noun
- A subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of an image projected by a camera lens.“The quality of the out-of-focus area in a wide-aperture image is called bokeh, originally from the Japanese word boke, pronounced bo-keh, which means fuzzy. In photography, bokeh reflects the shape and number of diaphragm blades in the lens, and that determines, in part, the way that out-of-focus points of light are rendered in the image. Bokeh is also a result of spherical aberration that affects”