Blue laws are called that most likely because “blue” was 18th-century slang for someone rigidly puritanical, and the label stuck to the strict Sabbath rules those moralists championed. The earliest written use of the phrase appears in a 1781 book by Reverend Samuel Peters, who used “blue” as an insult meaning cruel or bloody. A separate explanation you may have heard — that the statutes were printed on blue paper — is almost certainly a myth with no surviving evidence behind it.
The First Written Use: Samuel Peters, 1781
The phrase first appears in print in Reverend Samuel Peters’ General History of Connecticut, published in 1781. Peters was an Anglican clergyman and Loyalist who had fled to England during the Revolution, and he wrote about the Puritan codes of the New Haven Colony with open hostility. He defined blue laws as “bloody laws; for they were all sanctified with whipping, cutting off the ears, burning the tongue, and death.”1Project Gutenberg. General History of Connecticut In his usage, “blue” was shorthand for cruel: laws enforced through violence against the body.
Peters catalogued dozens of rules he claimed governed colonial life down to the smallest detail — what people could eat, when they could kiss their spouses, how they spent every hour of the Sabbath. Historians have long questioned whether he exaggerated or outright invented many of these rules. He wrote decades after the colony’s founding and had reason to resent the Puritans who had driven him out of Connecticut. Even so, his book planted the phrase “blue laws” in the American vocabulary, and no earlier use has been found.
The Blue Paper Myth
The most common explanation people repeat is that colonial Puritan laws were literally printed on blue paper. That story appears to be false. Peters himself never made the claim. He wrote that the laws of the New Haven Colony “were never suffered to be printed,” meaning authorities deliberately kept them from being printed at all.1Project Gutenberg. General History of Connecticut The blue paper claim surfaced around 1788, after Peters’ book was already circulating, and no one has produced a surviving example of colonial legislation on blue paper. Etymologists today generally dismiss the theory.
“Blue” as 17th-Century Slang for Puritanical
The more widely accepted explanation traces “blue” through its older associations with moral rigidity. In the 17th century, Scottish Covenanters adopted blue as their identifying color in contrast to royal red, and the color picked up connotations of religious strictness. The English Parliament of 1653 was mockingly called the “bluestocking parliament” for its puritanical character. Calling someone “blue” became a way to ridicule them as self-righteous or excessively pious.
Once that slang transferred from the people to the rules they pushed through, the label stuck. Under this reading, “blue laws” simply meant laws made by bluenoses — a cultural jab at moral overreach rather than any reference to ink color or paper stock. The contempt in Peters’ use of the word supports the idea that “blue” was already an established insult aimed at rigid moralists by the time his book appeared in 1781.
A Competing Reading: “Blue” as “Bloody”
Peters’ own definition points in a slightly different direction. He equated “blue” with “bloody,” framing the laws as cruel because of the punishments attached to them — whipping, mutilation, execution. Whether he was describing an existing usage or inventing one to fit his argument is unclear. His book is the earliest written record, but a word in print at a given moment usually means the word was in spoken use before that. The puritanical-slang explanation and the bloody-laws explanation are not mutually exclusive; both lean on “blue” as a term of disapproval, and the exact path the phrase traveled remains debated.
What the Laws Actually Were
The rules the name describes predate the name itself. Puritan colonies in the 1600s treated the Christian Sabbath as a civic duty, not just a religious one. The New Haven Colony required church attendance, banned labor and travel on Sundays, and punished violators with fines, public shaming, or time in the stocks. Colonial leaders saw Sabbath observance as essential to community order, and enforcement reflected that view. Other colonies passed similar rules, and as settlements grew into states, many carried forward some version of Sunday restrictions. The religious justification faded over time, but the laws themselves proved durable, which is why the colonial-era nickname is still in use today.
What “Blue Laws” Means Today
The phrase has outlived most of what it originally described. In modern usage, “blue laws” refers to any statute that restricts certain activities on Sundays — most commonly alcohol sales, car dealership operations, and in a few places, general retail. The name has stayed the same even as the laws have narrowed. At least seventeen states have dropped Sunday alcohol restrictions since 1995, and broad Sunday retail bans have mostly been repealed. The holdovers tend to cluster around alcohol rules, dealership closing laws, and a handful of local ordinances like the one in Bergen County, New Jersey, which still bars Sunday sales of clothing, furniture, home appliances, and building materials.
So when someone asks why they are called blue laws, the honest answer has two layers. The documented first use belongs to Samuel Peters in 1781, who meant “bloody.” The underlying slang almost certainly predates him, with “blue” already serving as a jab at rigid moralists in the English-speaking world. The blue paper story is folklore. The name has lasted longer than most of the laws it names.