Green

How to spell green

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce green

What does green mean?

1. adjectiveOf the colour between blue and yellow, like that of grass or leaves.
2. nounA piece of public grassy land, or the smooth turf around a hole on a golf course.
3. adjectiveNew to a job or activity and lacking experience.
4. adjectiveConcerned with protecting the natural environment.

Green in a sentence

• adjective

  She painted the kitchen walls a soft green shade.

• noun

  The village fair was held on the green near the church.

• adjective

  The new recruit was still green and needed close supervision.

• adjective

  The company switched to green energy to cut its emissions.

• adjective

  The traffic light turned green and the cars moved off.

• noun

  His putt rolled smoothly across the green and dropped in.

Where does green come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Green comes from the Old English grene, which meant the colour of growing plants and was used freely as both an adjective and a noun. That word traces back to a Germanic root, the same one that gave English the verb 'grow' and the noun 'grass', all built on the idea of living, sprouting vegetation. Because the colour, the act of growing, and the plant itself were so closely linked in the minds of early speakers, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable since before the year 900. Over the centuries the word picked up figurative meanings, first describing things that were unripe or freshly made and then, by extension, a person who was new and inexperienced. In the late twentieth century it gained a fresh political life as a label for anything concerned with protecting the natural environment, neatly returning to its original sense of living plants.

How the word is built

• green (from Old English grene, related to grow and grass)