Greens

How to spell greens

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce greens

What does greens mean?

1. nounGreen leafy vegetables eaten as food, such as spinach, kale, or cabbage.
2. nounThe smooth, closely mown areas of a golf course surrounding each hole.
3. nounOpen grassy areas, especially public or common ground in a town or village.

Greens in a sentence

• The doctor advised him to eat more leafy greens each day.

• The groundskeeper mowed the greens before the early tee times.

• Families gathered on the village greens for the summer fair.

• She steamed a bowl of greens to serve alongside the roast.

• Heavy rain left the greens soft and slow for the afternoon round.

• The council planted trees around the town greens last spring.

Where does greens come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English grene, an adjective meaning 'green' that was closely tied to the verb growan, 'to grow', so the colour and the idea of fresh, living plant growth were linked from the very start. The same Germanic root gave the Dutch groen and the German grun, and the connection to growing is why so many of the noun senses point at living plants rather than the colour alone. When the word is pluralised to 'greens', it usually names fresh leafy vegetables, a sense recorded in English from the 1700s. The golfing sense, the smooth grassy putting areas, grew out of the older meaning of a 'green' as a patch of grassland kept for common use, like a village green. The spelling is wholly native and regular, so the only thing to remember is the plain -s ending, with no awkward doubling or vowel change.

How the word is built

• green (from Old English grene: green, growing)
• -s (plural suffix)