Legendary

 items are weapons with a red text effect, usually with a, or  coloration. Unlike items, legendary items can spawn at any time, and be acquired anywhere. Legendary items don't have any restrictions on their parts, provided generic rules are respected.

About Legendary Items

 * Each manufacturer has one (and usually exactly one) legendary weapon for each weapon type it manufactures.
 * Orange weapons with inherent elemental properties are especially strong because they provide the elemental effects with no loss of damage rating (or sometimes even an increase), unlike normal elemental accessory parts that reduce damage by up to 40% in exchange for elemental properties. This, however, only applies to orange weapons that inherently possess specific element like the Atlas Ogre or Maliwan Hellfire. Orange weapons that do not inherently come in a specific element can occasionally be randomly generated with various elemental accessories, but these will result in a reduced base damage rating, as normal.
 * In Borderlands 2, legendary items are more like Borderlands' pearlescent items. Each Borderlands 2 legendary has a unique material pattern and some have more than one predefined part.

Pearlescent Items
items are a cross between unique items and super-legendary items. Please see the article for more information.

List of Legendary Items (Borderlands)
There is one (and exactly one) legendary weapon per valid manufacturer-weapon type pair. This table can be sorted to display either by manufacturers or by weapon types (or by model).

Trivia

 * Most items with flavor text on it carry a reference that is either historical, based off of pop culture, or a quote from a well-known individual or game.