Green

• 1. Introduction

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  Green sits on the visible spectrum between cyan and yellow, and the human eye can distinguish somewhere between 295 and 350 different shades of it. The dark-adapted eye is most sensitive at about 507 nanometers, a blue-green; the light-adapted eye peaks near 555 nanometers, a yellow-green. This is a color the eye seems built to notice. It is also a color tangled up in contradictions. It signals nature and health, yet for two centuries its most famous paints were laced with arsenic and copper. It means go ahead at a traffic light and permanent residence on an American card, but it also means jealousy, nausea, and the devil. How did one color come to carry the symbol of Islamic paradise, the dollar bill, and the green-eyed monster all at once? And why, in some languages, has green never been a separate color at all?

• 2. A Word That Means To Grow

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  The word green descends from the Old English and Middle English grene, sharing a root with grass and grow. Its Common Germanic ancestor, reconstructed as gronja-, surfaces in Old Norse graenn and Old High German gruoni, and traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to grow. The first recorded use of the word as a color term in Old English dates to around AD 700. Latin took a separate path with viridis, tied to virere, to grow, and ver, spring. That single Latin word seeded French vert, Italian verde, and the English vert and verdure. Slavic languages reached for zelenu, and Ancient Greek had chloros, a yellowish pale green that gives chlorine its name and is cognate with the word for the green of new growth. Comparative linguistics shows these terms were coined independently over the past few millennia. There is no single Proto-Indo-European word for green. The Slavic zelenu is even cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning yellow, ochre, or golden, a reminder that the boundary of green has never stood still.

• 3. Where Blue And Green Are One

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  In old Chinese, Thai, old Japanese, and Vietnamese, a single word can mean either blue or green. The Chinese character qing covers both, with blue and green traditionally treated as shades of it. Japanese carries the tension into daily life. Although Japanese traffic lights use the same colors as other countries, the green light is described with aoi, the word for blue, because green counts as a shade of it. Green apples and green shiso are called aoi too. Vietnamese uses xanh for both, splitting it into sky blue and leaf green only when needed. Modern European green corresponds to roughly 520 to 570 nanometers, but many historical and non-European languages drew the lines elsewhere. In studies of the world's color vocabularies, green appears as its own category only in languages that have developed the full set of six basic colors, or more rarely five. The Celtic languages had glasto-, a term for blue, green, and grey at once, which gave Old Irish glas, meaning green and grey, and Welsh glas, meaning blue. The Thai word for green also means rank and smelly, carrying associations far from any meadow.

• 4. The Chemistry Of Greenness

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  Chlorophyll is by far the largest contributor to green in nature, the chemical that lets plants photosynthesize and turn sunlight into chemical energy. It absorbs red and blue light efficiently and green light poorly, so the light plants reflect is enriched in green. The reason is evolutionary. Chlorophyll first arose in oceans where purple halobacteria, using bacteriorhodopsin, were already harvesting the green part of the spectrum. The newcomers were selected to exploit the wavelengths the halobacteria left untouched. Animals turned green for cover. Most fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds appear green from blue light reflecting through a layer of yellow pigment. Turacoverdin tints some birds, while insects and mollusks often owe their green to porphyrin pigments tied to diet, which can leave their feces green as well. The green huntsman spider gets its color from bilin pigments in its hemolymph and tissue fluids, camouflaging it as it hunts insects in vegetation. Even human skin can turn greenish from biliverdin, the green pigment in bile, or from ceruloplasmin, a protein that carries copper ions. Green eyes hold no green pigment at all. Like blue eyes, the color is an optical illusion, born from amber-brown pigment in the stroma combined with Rayleigh scattering of reflected light. Nobody is born with green eyes. Infants start with dark or blue eyes, and melanocytes only begin releasing melanin into the irises after birth, as they respond to light over time.

• 5. Poisons On The Palette

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  Verdigris was made by setting a warmed plate of copper, brass, or bronze into a vat of fermenting wine, leaving it for weeks, then scraping off the green powder. Pliny described the process in ancient times. The Romans used it in the murals of Pompeii, and Celtic manuscripts carried it as early as the 5th century AD. It produced a blue-green no other pigment could imitate, but it was unstable, could not resist dampness, ruined neighboring colors, and was toxic. Leonardo da Vinci warned painters against it in his treatise. Many green minerals supplied pigments over the centuries. The emerald owes its green to trace chromium and sometimes vanadium. Chromium oxide became chrome green, also called viridian, patented in 1859 and prized because it was stable and not toxic. Vincent van Gogh used viridian with Prussian blue to give a dark blue sky a greenish tint in Cafe Terrace at Night. Other greens followed from the laboratory. Sven Rinman, a Swedish chemist, discovered cobalt green in 1780. A chemist named Pannetier created green chrome oxide in Paris around 1835. The danger was real. In the nineteenth century, popular paints like verdigris, vert de Schweinfurt, and vert de Paris carried copper or arsenic, and some synthetic dyes were eventually banned. The intoxicating drink absinthe was known as the green fairy.

• 6. Rank, Money, And The Mona Lisa

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  In post-classical and early modern Europe, green marked wealth without nobility, the color of merchants, bankers, and the gentry while red was reserved for the nobility. The Mona Lisa wears green, as does the bride in the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck. The benches in the British House of Commons are green, where the landed gentry sat, while those in the House of Lords are red. There was a practical problem behind the symbolism. No good vegetal green dye resisted washing and sunlight, and dyes drawn from fern, nettles, leeks, or alder bark faded fast. Only in the 16th century did a durable green emerge, made by dyeing cloth blue with woad and then yellow with yellow-weed. In the United States, green became the color of the dollar bill. The reverse side has been green since 1861, chosen because it deterred counterfeiters using early cameras and because the thin banknotes did not let it bleed through to the front. L. Frank Baum drew on this in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where everyone in the Emerald City wears tinted glasses that make the place look green, read by some as a comment on the debate over paper money versus gold.

• 7. The Color Of Belief And Nation

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  According to tradition, the robe and banner of Muhammad were green, and the Koran promises those in paradise green silk robes. Green became a Shi'a color. Al-Khidr, the Green One, met and traveled with Moses in the Qur'an, given the name for his role as a diplomat and negotiator. Christianity dressed its clergy in green vestments during Ordinary Time, and in the Eastern Catholic Church green marks Pentecost. In Ireland and Scotland, green stands for Catholics and orange for Protestants. Flags carry the color across the world. The green in the flag of Italy, dating to 1797 and the Cisalpine Republic, recalls the army's military uniforms, the Italian landscape, or hope. Brazil's green was adapted from the Empire of Brazil and represented the royal family. Pakistan's dark green fills the larger portion of its flag for the Muslim majority, with a white bar for religious minorities. Bangladesh sets a red disc on a green field standing for the lushness of the land. Green is one of the colors of Pan-Africanism, borrowed from the Ethiopian flag, and appears on the flags of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and others. The 1977 flag of Libya was a plain green field, the only national flag in the world with a single color and no design.

• 8. Signals, Sport, And Superstition

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  The first traffic light, using green and red gas lamps, was erected in 1868 in front of the Houses of Parliament in London. It exploded the following year and injured the policeman operating it. In 1912, the first modern electric traffic lights went up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Green was chosen largely because it could not be mistaken for red. Sport claimed the color too. Gambling tables in casinos are traditionally green, a tradition said to have begun in Venice in the 16th century. Billiards tables took green woolen cloth after the grass courts of earlier lawn games, with the first indoor tables dating to the 15th century. British racing green served as Britain's international motor racing color from the early 1900s until the 1960s. Folklore gave green a darker cast. In the Middle Ages the devil was often shown as red, black, or green, and dragons were green for their reptile heads and tails. The leprechaun wears green now, though before the 20th century he usually wore red. In the poster for the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, the monster had a green face, and Bela Lugosi wore green-hued makeup as Dracula in the 1927 to 1928 Broadway production. William Shakespeare coined the green-eyed monster in Othello, calling jealousy the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. From a face in a portrait to a fairy in a drink, green keeps refusing to settle into a single meaning.