Green
- HEX
- #2E9A4F
- RGB
- 46 154 79
- HSL
- 138° 54% 39%
- CMYK
- 70 0 49 40
Language
Green, grow and grass come from one root meaning to grow. The word is a picture of living plants. Some languages use a single word for green and blue: Vietnamese xanh covers both, and linguists nickname such words grue. See basic-color-terms.
History
Green was a painter's headache. Copper greens like verdigris could brown with age. In 1775 Carl Scheele made a cheap, brilliant copper arsenite green, and Victorian homes were papered in poison (arsenic-greens). The tale that green wallpaper killed Napoleon is unproven: his hair held arsenic and his St Helena wallpaper did too, but most historians blame stomach cancer.
Science
Your eyes are most sensitive to yellow-green. In daylight, light near 555 nanometers looks brighter than any other wavelength of the same strength. See trichromacy.
Philosophy
Goethe saw green as the point where yellow and blue balance. On it, he wrote, 'the eye and the mind repose', which made green his pick for rooms you live in (theory-of-colours).
Culture
The Quran dresses the people of paradise in green silk, and green became Islam's color, found on many Muslim flags. Catholic priests wear green through Ordinary Time, the long stretches between feasts (liturgical-colors). Heraldry calls it vert.
Art
The woman in van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait wears a deep green gown, fur-lined, its heavy folds pooling on the floor: a show of costly cloth in a room full of luxuries.
Kin
- Red: Complementary opposites, and the stop and go of every traffic light
- Blue: Many languages use one word for both, the 'grue' words
- Emerald: Emerald green paint of 1814 was laced with arsenic
- Grey: Goethe's Faust: grey is theory, green the golden tree of life
- Malachite: One of the oldest green pigments, a ground copper mineral
Sources
- Etymonline, 'green', 'grow', 'grass'
- Jones & Ledingham, 'Arsenic in Napoleon's wallpaper', Nature (1982); BMJ/PMC, 'Channelling the Emperor: what really killed Napoleon?'
- Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Eastlake (1840)
- CIE photopic luminosity function (peak 555 nm)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.