How 'Green' Became Green

The original Earth Day Proclamation in 1970 refers to “our beautiful blue planet,” and the first Earth Day flag consisted of a NASA photo of the earth on a dark blue background. But the color of fields and forests prevailed, and today when we think of ecology and environmentalism, we think green not blue.

The connection of the color green to growing things is found in nature, of course, and the word green has “associations with verdure, freshness, newness, health, and vitality [that are] are widespread among the Germanic languages,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. So in Old and early Middle English, we find forms of the word used to refer to the color of living vegetation, grass, and to grassy areas or leafy trees.

The meaning was extended to refer especially to tender or unripe vegetation and then more generally. The expression “green cheese,” for example, from the late fourteenth century, refers to cheese that still needed to be aged. The notion of green as unripe provided the basis for its later extension to people, so by the mid-sixteenth century, green could be used to refer to immaturity, rawness or inexperience.

In medieval and Renaissance literary symbology, green retained that sense of immaturity. Green became the color of young love as well, and sometimes of fickleness, and it was the color of both the sea and of fortune. Green was also associated with “greensickness,” referring to the jaundice of chlorosis, a type of anemia common in young women.

By William Shakespeare’s time, green had a variety of symbolic possibilities, and he used most of them in his plays. In “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” Don Armando’s page Moth jokes with his master, who is discoursing on famous loves:

Armando: O well-knit Sampson, strong-jointed Samson!…I am in love too. Who was Sampson’s love, my dear Moth?

Moth: A woman, master.

Armando: Of what complexion?

Moth: Of all the four, or the three, or the two, or one of the four.

Armando: Tell me precisely of what complexion.

Moth: Of the sea-water green, sir.

Armando: Is that one of the four complexions?

Moth: As I have read, sir, and the best of them, too.

Armando: Green indeed is the color of lovers; but to have a love of that color, methinks Sampson had small reason for it. He surely affected her for her wit.

Moth: It was so, sir, for she had a green wit. (I. ii. 72–89)

The four complexions mentioned are the four...

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