Other forms: greens, greener
Green is the colour of grass and leaves. Painted green, green fields, a green jumper.
It is the colour the human eye distinguishes most finely, because our vision is most sensitive in that part of the spectrum. Green also means environmentally friendly — green energy, the Green Party — and inexperienced: a green recruit. In Britain, a green is also a public grassed space: the village green. Note green with envy; greenhouse; give the green light; and green fingers, meaning skill with plants.
1noungreenThe colour of grass and leaves.~75%
“The whole front door was green until about 1998.”
2adjectiveenvironmentallyEnvironmentally friendly, or inexperienced.~25%
“They switched to green energy and put solar panels on the roof.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
green is a colour.
Old English grene comes from a root meaning to grow, the same as grass and grow. Green is named after growing rather than after any pigment, which is a rare case of a colour named for a process.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰreh₁-
Middle English
grene
English, today
green
From Middle English grene. From Middle English grene, from Old English grēne, from Proto-West Germanic grōnī, from Proto-Germanic grōniz, from Proto-Indo-European gʰreh₁- (“to grow”). More at grow. a doublet of Gruen. See also frr green, West Frisian grien, Dutch groen, Low German grön, green, greun, German grün, Danish and Norwegian Nynorsk grøn, Swedish grön, Norwegian Bokmål grønn, Faroese grønur, Icelandic grænn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA