Other forms: jades
Jade is the hard green stone that gets carved into beads, bangles and small animals — deep green, slightly milky, cool against the skin. The word doubles as the colour: a soft green with blue behind it, the shade of a jade ring or a jade-painted door.
As an adjective it names that colour and nothing else: jade walls, a jade silk dress. The stone matters enormously in Chinese art, where it was prized above gold, so 'jade' on a museum label means a carving, not a shade of paint. Two different minerals share the name, jadeite and nephrite, and jewellers care a great deal about which one you have. Do not connect it to jaded, meaning bored and unimpressed, which is a separate word with its own history. And a jade plant is the fat-leaved houseplant that survives being forgotten, named for the colour of its leaves.
1nounhardA hard green stone used for jewellery and carving.
“A small elephant carved from jade sat on the desk.”
2adjectivejadeOf a soft green colour with a hint of blue.
“She painted the kitchen cupboards jade.”
jade is a mineral.
Jade reached English through French, and the French made it by mis-splitting a word: earlier éjade got heard as le jade. Before that it was Spanish piedra de ijada, 'stone of the flank', from Latin ilia, 'the flank' — because people believed a piece held against your side cured the pain there. A cure for a stitch, turned into a jewel.
Latin
ilia — flank
Vulgar Latin
*iliata
Spanish
piedra de ijada — flank stone
French
le jade
English, today
jade
Built from
Borrowed from French le jade, rebracketing of earlier éjade (“jade”), from Spanish piedra de ijada (“flank stone”), via Vulgar Latin iliata from Latin ilia (“flank”). (Jade was thought to cure pains in the side.)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA