More than 1,200 years ago, an unidentified Maya artist decorated an extraordinary, 16-inch circular ceramic plate, painting one half in flat, nearly black slip and the other a creamy off-white.

On Wednesday nights when I was growing up, a local Baptist preacher drove an off-white school bus through our community to pick up kids for his church’s weekly children’s program.

I scanned the stacks of books teetering against one wall, not on shelves but layered like bricks, and a slim off-white spine called to me: Sylvia Plath’s "Ariel."

Portions of the sky that were once a vivid orangish yellow have faded to off-white.

The emergency department was a tidy, off-white building until Israeli troops returned there in March.