Greenfield

How to spell greenfield

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce greenfield

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does greenfield mean?

1. adjectiveDescribing an area of land that has never been built on and is being considered for development.
2. adjectiveDescribing a project or system built entirely from scratch, free of any existing constraints or legacy work.

Greenfield in a sentence

• The council approved housing on a greenfield site at the edge of town.

• The team enjoyed the greenfield project because they could design everything from the ground up.

• Developers prefer greenfield land because there is nothing to demolish first.

• Unlike the messy upgrade, this was a clean greenfield build with no old code to maintain.

Where does greenfield come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two very old native English words. 'Green' descends from the Old English 'grene', which referred to the colour of growing plants and ultimately traces back to a Germanic root meaning 'to grow', the same source that gives us 'grow' and 'grass'. 'Field' comes from Old English 'feld', meaning open or cleared land, related to words across the Germanic languages for flat country. Joined together, 'greenfield' literally pictures a grassy, untouched stretch of land, and from the twentieth century it took on a technical life in planning and business: a 'greenfield site' is land never previously built on, and by extension a 'greenfield project' is one begun completely from scratch with no existing structures or systems to work around. Because both parts are ordinary words spelled exactly as you would expect, the only real spelling decision is remembering that it is written as one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• green (Old English grene, 'green')
• field (Old English feld, 'open land')