Green: a dictionary definition

Welcome to my blog, which will explore the wide spectrum of meanings of the colour green, from the carved green men on the walls of medieval churches to the radioactive 'green slime' of 1950s B movies, taking in absinthe, the Wicked Witch of the West and Kermit the Frog along the way. I hope you'll join me, whether you're interested in colour theory, a fan of terrible sci-fi films with amazing posters, or just curious about all things green!

A good place to start would seem to be with a dictionary definition:

The English word green, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is 'a colour intermediate between blue and yellow in the spectrum; of the colour of grass, foliage, an emerald, etc.' Etymologically speaking, the word has Germanic rather than French roots, so entered the English language before the Norman Conquest of 1066 via Old English grene. It is cognate with words from various other Germanic languages: Old Frisian grēne, meaning 'green, fresh'; Middle Dutch groene, 'green, fresh, youthful, inexperienced, (of food) raw, untreated'; Middle Low German gröne, 'green, greenness, greenery, verdure, grassy ground, fruit, vegetables, greens'; Old High German gruonī, 'green, greenness, verdure, health, vigour'; Old Icelandic grœnn, 'fresh, hopeful, good'; Old Swedish grön, 'green, fresh, new'; Old Danish grøn, 'green, fresh'.

As this etymological salad bar of words shows, the associations of green with freshness, newness, growth, health and vitality were widespread across the Gemanic languages. Interestingly, the Old Danish grøn appears to be derived from the Germanic root word grô-, meaning 'to grow', which is linked in turn to the English word grass.

The first recorded use of green in English, again going by the OED, is in a Latin-Old English glossary in a tenth-century manuscript probably copied at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury (British Library MS Cotton Cleopatra* A. III), which glosses the Latin carpassinum as grene gærs (green grass).

Map of Europe showing Germanic language areas (in brown)
(Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998)

* Sir Robert Cotton, the great seventeenth-century manuscript collector, named all the sub-sections of his collection after the busts of Roman emperors standing at the end of each shelf. His collection, which contains a considerable proportion of all surviving Old and Middle English manuscripts, is now in the British Library (minus the busts).