The article examines the meanings, both literal and figurative, that are expressed in the British national press by the words blue and blues. The materials on which this study is based come from two corpora of newspaper texts: one collected from the daily newspaper The Guardian, and the other from the weekly magazine The Economist. In its main part, the paper analyses numerous instances of blue and blues use to determine their meanings in respective contexts. This is done to see which aspects of their meaning potential are activated in newspapers targeted at different readerships and preoccupied with dissimilar thematic and ideological concerns.