What is Bokeh?

Have you ever heard the word "bokeh"? I've heard it and read it lots of time but haven't got the idea of what really is until some time ago. I was so silly that I thought it was some kind of Korean or Japanese food=p But then I was so curious and find the actual meaning of it. It turns out that it has to do with photography...Wow..what a really wrong thought I had earlier. Food and Photography? Doesn't really related ha ha ha.But at least I was close enough that the origin of the word is from Japanese language.

I always love to see those photo with blurry background and such. And now I know that it is called bokeh. Here are some of the examples and here's what Wikipedia describes Bokeh:

In photography, bokeh is the blur,or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— "good" or "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it often associated with such areas.However, bokeh is not limited to highlights, as blur occurs in all out-of-focus regions of the image.

The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji, the "blur quality". The Japanese term boke is also used in the sense of a mental haze or senility.

(image source from top: one, two, three, four, five)