Word of the Week – Green

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

In honor of the holiday of “the wearin o’ the green,” I thought we’d take a look at the history of green today.

Not surprisingly, various spellings of green have been around as long as English itself has been (Old English was grene), and also not surprisingly, it has Germanic roots which means that other Germanic languages have cognates. So where did it originate?

The root of the word is ghre-, which means “to grow.” Makes sense, right? Note that grass comes from this same root. Green is denoted as “the color of living plants.”

As early as the 1100s, green could mean “covered with grass or foliage” as well as “the appearance of someone who’s sick,” and from the 1300s onward, we’ve used it to refer to unripened fruit or vegetables…and hence also the metaphorical sense of people who are immature. Round about 1600, that metaphorical sense extended to mean “gullible.”

So what about some phrases with green in them?

One of the oldest is actually green room; I expected this to be linked to film, but in fact it’s rooted in stage and has been used since 1701 to mean the “room for actors that are not on stage.” Why? Well, the best guess is that a well-known one was painted green. 😉 Green light comes (no surprises here) from the lights used on railroads as early as 1883 to signal a train had permission to enter the tracks, but it didn’t enter the vernacular for a general sense of “permission” until 1937. And one year later in 1938, green thumb also came along for someone who’s good at gardening (I thought that one would be older!). Using green to refer to environmentalism is from 1971.

Word Nerds Merch!