Word for Wednesday: Green

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Our Word for Wednesday theme for January is colours. 

The word colour entered English via Old French and comes from the Latin ‘color’, from the Old Latin ‘colos’ meaning ‘a covering’, from the PIE root ‘kel-’ meaning ‘to conceal’. The word has been used in reference to skin colour since the early-thirteenth century and in reference to pigments and dye since the fourteenth century. 

The spelling colour became the common English spelling from the fourteenth century, but a classical correction made color an alternative from the fifteenth century. Color is now the common American English spelling of this word.

So far we’ve looked at the words red, orange, and yellow. Today’s word is green. 

Green falls between yellow and blue on the colour spectrum and is the hue of growing grass and emeralds. 

The word comes from the Old English ‘grene’, from the Proto Germanic ‘gronjg’. Green has been used both to refer to plants and to describe an unwell-looking person since the thirteenth century. Its definition evolved to include some types of fruits and vegetables in the fourteenth century and the colour has been associated with environmentalism since 1971.
 


27 Jan 2021
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