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verdant

US/ˈvɜɹ.dənt/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,387 of 15,258neutral

Verdant means bright green with fresh growth. A verdant valley, verdant hills, verdant and lush.

It is literary and it describes landscape rather than objects — nothing small is verdant. It means green with growth rather than merely green, which is why a painted fence is not. Note that the French comes from vert, green, from the Latin viridis, which also gives verdure and Verdi.

Definitions of verdant

  1. 1adjectiveverdantBright green with fresh growth.C2

    “The train wound through verdant valleys after weeks of spring rain.”

    synonyms: lush, leafy

verdant is a quality of greenness.

Where it comes from

Middle French verdoyant comes from vert, green, from Latin viridis. Verdure and verdigris come from the same green.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)ker-

  2. Latin

    viridis

  3. Middle French

    verdoyant

  4. English, today

    verdant

Built from

  • vert · Old French — green

From Middle French verdoyant, from Old French - verb verdier, verdoier, from vert (“green”), from Vulgar Latin - *virdis, from Latin viridis.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather

Practise this word

verdant in the wild

  • Zeuxine, commonly known as verdant jewel orchids, is a genus of about eighty species of orchids in the tribe Cranichideae.

    Zeuxine

  • Basiothia medea, the small verdant hawk, is a moth of the family Sphingidae.

    Basiothia medea

  • The verdant universities, also referred to as the gumtree universities, are a group of Australian universities founded in the 1960s and 1970s.

    Verdant universities

  • The verdant universities often stand in contrast to the older and ostensibly more prestigious sandstone universities.

    Verdant universities

  • The backdrop curtain is pulled slightly open to reveal a distant landscape showing a transition from barren hills to a verdant townscape, a metaphor for resurrection.

    Madonna and Child (Bellini, New York, 1485–1490)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the vert family

thwartverdant

verdant — used about once every 20,553 pages · #13,387 · point at the bar for the others